The Logical Progression
by Blue Eyes At Night
Summary: Given Arthur and Ariadne isn't their romance just a logical progression? Missing Scenes/ Training Sessions/ and a little insight into the Hotel during the Fischer Job then post-Fischer life. Connecting One Shots  read one or all
1. Chapter 1

A/N- first time inception writer (long time on ff) but some of you probably recognize me as an avid reader in the category. trying to be as movie-sound as possible

The Logical Progression

Arthur was nothing if not crisp. His shirts were ironed, his suits dry-cleaned, his shoes polished to a precise shine. It was the basis of his job, the way he kept himself alive, this immaculate precision. She always imagined him precisely as precise as he was because it was something she admired about him.

"Ariadne?"

His voice shook her out of her focus, "Yes?"

"Are you particularly fond of my suit?"

"No, why?"

"Does your subconscious like it?" Arthur nodded to a group of men passing by them on the street dressed identically to him and Ariadne blushed. In the same second the group of men were wearing regular clothes again.

"Sorry." She offered but Arthur's stoic expression remained.

"You've just beautifully demonstrated why we have to be careful to be as impartial and disinterested in our surroundings as possible. We have to remain neutral and we have to keep the subject neutral or else the subconscious starts emulating focused feelings. That's the same logic behind not using memories to build from—the subconscious has a field day with embedded emotion in memories. It can make for a pretty violent dreamscape."

"It won't happen again."

Arthur's face lightened for a second, "I'm not a school teacher here to scold you, Ariadne. Don't apologize to me like you would to Professor Miles. Learn from your mistakes and for the love of God make all of your mistakes _here_ and _now_ in your training rather than making them closer to the job. I need you properly focused before Fischer because we don't know if we're going to need last minute changes in the mazes or if you will have to re-design on the fly."

Ariadne nodded and took a breath, "Ok…what's today's lesson, teach?"

Arthur let a small smile creep onto the very corner of his mouth and said, "Today's lesson is stacking spirals."

* * *

Ariadne came out of the dream smiling and wishing she were still climbing up the levels of spiraled sea-shells Arthur had built as an example for her. He insisted that they were cut-rate and that he looked forward to an actual architect refining them but they both knew that Arthur would have to teach her how to build with Cobb so deeply engrossed with Mal. Arthur didn't like to talk about it because he didn't really know what was going on. He knew Mal was active enough in Cobb's subconscious to shoot Arthur in the kneecap and that had shocked him. He was afraid of what he didn't know about Cobb's stability and even more anxious that there was no amount of research he could do to figure it out. He was a point man. He was supposed to be good with details.

* * *

"Arthur?"

He pulled himself out of his thoughts and focused on Ariadne, "Yes?"

"Yusef and I are almost done with his layout. It's broad and basic and he has it down pat. You're up and I was wondering what sort of location you wanted."

It had been a long time since someone had asked Arthur what kind of dream he wanted. He'd been working with Cobb for so long that they didn't need to discuss it anymore but Ariadne was still getting to know him.

"You pick, I'll see it in our first walk through."

"Which is when?"

He looked at his watch, "Two hours from now."

Part of him was hoping that Ariadne would insist that creating something without direction and bringing it up to Arthur's impeccable standard was completely impossible in two hours. The other part of him knew that Ariadne loved a challenge.

She was smirking at him, "An hour and a half ok for you?"

He smirked right back, "Perfect."

* * *

In an hour and a half and Ariadne had created something mind-blowing.

"Why a hotel?" He was still craning his head, looking at all the details, admiring the décor that was tailored to his taste. His subconscious was happy too—they were all laughing and joking and drinking in delight.

"You probably live in them most of the time, so does Fischer so it makes sense that you would both feel instantly comfortable in the layout. Hotels are pretty basic so I don't have to worry about fabric detailing or anything. Also we need a secure location for the third dream and a room with a locked door is probably the best location. There's also plenty of room to run from the subconscious through the stairwells and outside if we had too but the hotel is so complex internally we probably won't need to."

"Excellent reasoning. You know I'll want to see the outside as well but for now let's start with the basics. Where do you think Fischer should start?"

"At the bar. Hotel bars get the most use out of any part of the hotel."

Arthur nodded, "Another good choice. So from the bar to a hotel room. Let's see what we're dealing with."

At first glance the hotel was a fine first draft. With two detail-oriented people studying the plans the hotel quickly evolved.

"When do I get to see your version?" Ariadne asked and Arthur glanced at his watch. For a second he couldn't remember if the time on his watch was proper for the day that he was living in so he reached into his pocket and felt his totem's reassuring weight.

"How's now? It's still early enough."

Ariadne walked over to the lawn chair and plopped herself in, "Beam me up, Scotty."

Arthur's version of the hotel was more realistically refined than Ariadne's because he had far more experience with five-star hotels than she did.

"Very nice." She purred in approval as they walked into the bar, arm in arm. She looked down and saw that her outfit had changed which was something that hadn't happened in any of her dreams yet, "What happened to my clothes?"

"One thing the dreamer can do is manipulate the clothing of others in the dream. It's helpful if you're pulling someone into extreme conditions—just think about how awful it would be to pull someone into a desert while they were wearing a parka."

Ariadne nodded and studied her new clothes. Her usual jeans and t-shirt were discarded in favor of a fitted cocktail dress that was a deep purple. She had a cashmere black shawl draped over her shoulders and black suede pumps on her feet. Her hair was pulled up but she couldn't see what it looked like without a mirror.

"So you subconsciously want me to look a little bit more lady-like?" Ariadne asked and Arthur felt surprisingly taken aback by the question, "That sounds negative. Think of it this way—we always imagine ourselves dressed in our most familiar clothes. I live in this suit. We have a tendency to refine clothes in dreams that we are projecting on purpose. I've made my suit more expensive. I want the dream to look cohesive so I dressed you up to look like my date instead of my architect. I have no personal vendetta against your scarves and Oxfords."

Ariadne smirked at him and blushed, "Well if I'm dressed up like your date you should definitely treat me more like a date and buy me a drink or my subconscious will kick your ass."

Arthur escorted her to the bar and she surprised him by ordering a very rare red wine. When the bartender let Arthur test it for approval he almost purred, "Excellent choice, Ariadne."

She beamed when he complimented her and they walked around the bar, sipping wine, debating where Fischer would sit, and discussing how the kick would happen. Ariadne didn't catch on to why they were avoiding investigating the hotel room until she started realizing little details- the lighting in the room got lower, candles were lit, a violin quartette was beginning to play Italian and French love songs, and outside a gentle rain began to fall. The rain gave Ariadne the same feeling it always did—that she wanted to curl up under the covers and be deliciously lazy. Arthur was controlling her environment and he was setting a progressively more and more romantic one with each sip of wine he had.

Her subconscious wasn't exactly helping the situation. Suddenly her subconscious was predominantly couples who were in various stages of public affection all around them. Everywhere people were holding hands, kissing, nuzzling together to share secrets and laugh privately.

"Quick, finish your drink and let's go upstairs."

Ariadne quirked an eyebrow at Arthur and teased, "I rarely respond to a man who commands me to get buzzed and go into a hotel room with him."

At first she thought he didn't understand that she was joking because he took her free hand, raised it to his lips, lightly kissed it and said, "You look beautiful."

She didn't know what to say.

He leaned forward and put two fingers under her chin like he was going to kiss her and whispered, "Please…come upstairs."

When he pulled back he winked at her and said, "First finish the wine."

Part of her wanted to laugh at his joke so he knew that she got it… part of her was shocked to discover that she wished he wasn't joking.

Upstairs the rooms were lavish, the bathrooms were regally fitted, and Arthur was slightly embarrassed that the bed was projected with the sheets folded down and ready for occupancy. The bathtub had a champagne bucket next to it with Dom Perignon on ice and perfumed bubble bath beside it. He also knew if he turned on the TV there would be a mix of Casablanca, Shakespeare remakes, original James Bond and porn. He couldn't help it because he could control his projection of the dream but not the subconscious desires that were attached to things like TVs, fancy hotel bathrooms, and beautiful women he wanted to get naked with. He wished very much that he hadn't dressed up Ariadne for the dream. In the real world he always asked himself what she would look like if she took more than ten minutes to throw together clothes. Arthur was constantly astounded by her mind, he was amazed by her quick learning and her devotion to the team.

Now he was amazed by how well she wore a satin cocktail dress.

It was his own fault for giving into that desire and consequently warping the desire into something more distracting. He should've left her in the jeans and staved off his physical attraction for her by focusing on his working relationship with her.

He would've paid a _lot_ of money to have his dreamscape anywhere besides such a marvelous hotel right about now. But he also didn't quite feel up to being torn apart by Ariadne's enraged subconscious.

Ariadne absorbed the details of the room quickly, "You're much better at amenities than I am."

She ran her fingers over the champagne and bubble bath and walked across the room, right in front of him, and sat on the bed.

"I should be better at hotel details, I practically live in them after all."

"Do you always live in them with girls that you dress up in pretty outfits?"

"No. You would be the first to get such an honor and a privilege as to visit my room while I'm working."

"Well technically it's my building so maybe _you're_ the one who should feel honored and privileged. And let's face it—it's a dream. You don't actually live here so it can't be that much of an honor."

Arthur sat down on the bed next to her and thought very hard about whether or not he should say what he wanted to say.

He decided to tell her, "Ariadne you're in my _mind_. You're in my dream. Most girls would be perfectly flattered to be told they're in a man's dream."

"Isn't it my job to be in your dreams sometimes?" She asked and he reached out and cupped her cheek in his hand so that she had to look into his eyes when he answered her.

"Trust me…you spend time in my dreams when we aren't working and after tonight I'm sure you'll be clocking overtime." He leaned in and kissed her cheek, "And don't think that your subconscious escaped my notice downstairs."

"Nothing escapes your notice; it's part of your charm."

He smiled and leaned forward for a kiss. Ariadne's subconscious decided he wasn't pushing her limits hard enough and suddenly the room next to them was inhabited by a couple having incredibly loud sex.

"Trying to tell me something, Ariadne?"

She blushed, shrugged off her shawl, kicked off her shoes, and laid down on the bed, "It's a good thing I'm not completely controlled by my subconscious."

The TV flashed on and Mal was on it, menacing towards the viewer with a knife and stabbing her, and then the TV went blank. Arthur understood her perfectly, "Yes…sometimes it's better to use a little sense."

He kicked off his shoes, folded his jacket neatly on the edge of the bed and laid down facing Ariadne who curled up against his chest. She sighed happily when he wrapped an arm around her waist and rested his chin on her head.

"How much time do we have left in here?" She asked.

"About an hour."

"Can we just stay like this?... Assuming you don't want to continue your tour of the place."

"Tour's over for tonight… have you ever seen Casablanca?"

"No."

"It happens to be on tonight."

They wouldn't finish Casablanca in the dream and about a minute before the dream would end Ariadne rolled onto her back and pulled Arthur on top of her.

"I want to tell you something before we wake up." She ran both of her hands through his hair and he studied her face, "Sometimes you really shouldn't ignore your subconscious desires. They can be a real bitch when they're pent up too long."

He smiled, "Are you saying you want to take some subconscious desires out on me some time?"

"Well…certainly not in your dreams." She winked and disappeared into the real world. A few seconds later Arthur disappeared too.

* * *

They both watched Cobb with anxious eyes and wondered how much he was hiding. Ariadne knew better than Arthur what was going on and she felt guilty over keeping it from him.

Cobb left the room and both Ariadne and Arthur let loose a breath they were only half aware of holding. They were worried. They were also trying to focus on Cobb so that they didn't have to discuss the other night in the dream hotel. Eames and Cobb both toyed with Ariadne to some extent in their dreams (when he contributed to her training Eames had gone so far as to pinch her butt to show her how to startle reactions from the subconscious if you actually wanted that sort of thing) but nothing quite like the romantic set up of the Casablanca Night had come up before. Ariadne wondered if she should treat it like any other dream—a fantasy.

"You're due for your next lesson, Ariadne." Arthur's voice hit her ears and she snapped out of her thoughts.

"Which is?"

"Trap doors, secret passageways and short cuts."

"Sounds like a theme park attraction."

Arthur quirked a small smile, "In a way all the dreams are like theme park attractions. Until the tourists try to beat you to death with funnel cake."

"Was that a joke Mr. Serious?"

"Of course not."

Inside the dream Arthur had built a house. Ariadne craned her neck to try and get all the details—Dali paintings covered the walls (and one Picasso from his Blue Period) and all the metal she could see was either vintage gold or modern titanium. Black velvet curtains hung over black and white tiled floors with deep red walls. Modern and classic elements were mixed in a way that reminded Ariadne of Arthur's suits—modern takes on vintage designs.

"Where are we?"

"A house I'd love to own someday." Arthur walked through a set of double doors into a grand walkway that was a modified version of Versailles' Hall of Mirrors, "It's a collection of all of my favorite architectural designs from everywhere—different periods, places, etc. It also happens to be a treasure trove of trap doors and secret passageways."

"No short cuts?"

"Short cuts are outside in the gardens."

Ariadne craned her head around and realized they were quite alone, "Where are my projections?"

Arthur's head tilted, "I don't keep servants but outside someone is mowing the lawn—looks like you've projected domestic workers into this setting."

Ariadne shrugged and followed Arthur as they walked around. He didn't have to explain the different elements of the house to her because she was able to pick all of them out. In one particularly hectic room with too many different kinds of couches in it Ariadne exclaimed, "Forty six different couches? I would've thought you enjoyed a little more specificity."

Arthur actually blushed ever so slightly, "I could use a better architect than myself to make better use of the elements. Maybe the next room will interest you more?"

He opened the door for her and as soon as Ariadne stepped onto the plush red rug she fell right through it. At the bottom she landed on a giant mattress and Arthur called down, "Trap door."

"Ha ha. How do I get out of here?"

"There's a door to your left, take the stairs up two flights then push open the mirror."

When Ariadne emerged she was just on the other side of the carpet and Arthur had walked around it, "Do you see how trapdoors are most effective?"

"When entirely hidden?"

"And when they become an entirely natural thing for the projection—or the subject—to fall into or activate in some way. You didn't think it was strange that I opened a door for you and that you should walk in first without having to check your surroundings for danger—part of a trap's effectiveness are the people around it. You trust me not to trick you even when I tell you I'm teaching a lesson on trap doors and so something as juvenile as a rug over a hole worked on you."

"Like if Eames had opened the door and insisted I walked in first it would have raised red flags so this would've been a poor choice of trap door for him."

Arthur smiled at the quip, "Precisely."

A door slammed somewhere and Arthur looked in the direction of the noise, "All the surprises of this lesson are really going to aggravate your subconscious."

"They're getting pretty used to it at this point." Ariadne shrugged, "I'm sure you'll make it out with a slap on the wrist and a mild scolding."

Arthur quirked an eyebrow at her, "I'm sure that's the worst they'll do."

He walked in front of her and leaned against the fireplace with a mantle that boasted dozens of candlesticks in various stages of melted, "Ariadne if you would join me I would love to show you someplace where we could avoid your subconscious for a while if we had to."

His words made Ariadne blush and she stepped so close to him that she could smell his cologne. Without explaining himself Arthur reached over to one of the many candlesticks perched on the mantle and pulled it outward. The whole fireplace flipped like a scene out of James Bond and Ariadne found herself on the other side of the wall in a secret room that was currently blank.

Suddenly the room had a chair with straps on it—a torture device.

"See how useful this could be?"

The room flipped again and became a replica of the hotel room from the Casablanca Night. On the bed was a red rose and Arthur walked over to it and picked it up. Just as suddenly the room went blank again. The house rumbled and he looked upwards, "Your subconscious doesn't like this lesson."

He walked over to Ariadne and handed her the rose. For a moment they both smiled and quietly thought about what they could do with more time alone. Just for a moment. The air suddenly smelled like freshly cleaned sheets and the same delicious wine they'd had in their dream hotel's bar. Then Arthur took Ariadne's hand in his and said, "Follow me. Time to teach you the beauty of secret passageways."

The passageway was long and winding and it became progressively narrower in some spaces before belling out into a wide space again, "Hidden in the bricks are doors that open to other rooms or we could take this hallway around the entire house."

"Can we tour the house another time?"

Arthur paused walking, "Open a door whenever you feel like it."

Ariadne looked at his face and tried to figure out if he wanted her to open one now or not. She walked over to the brick wall and looked for the hidden door. She finally noticed one brick was a slightly different shade and when she pressed on it the hallway opened up into a lavish Master bedroom.

They were silent for a minute before Ariadne turned around and saw Arthur leaning against a bookshelf, studying her reaction.

"Should we consider why we keep winding up in bedrooms?"

Arthur smirked and snorted a laugh. He walked over to her carefully punctuating his sentence with his steps, "I think we both know why."

"Should we talk about what to do about it?" Ariadne twisted a stray lock of hair around her finger. Arthur was inches from her and his face softened for a minute as he reached out and brushed his knuckles gently across her cheek.

"Should we? Yes. But you don't want to hear the conversation."

"Does it end badly?"

"Yes." Arthur pulled his hand back and jammed it into one of his pockets, "This job isn't a game. In fact it is the worst possible job for a novice to be on. This job is _extremely_ dangerous and _extremely_ difficult- inception has never worked on a grand scale before no matter what Cobb has told you. Nobody on the team –_nobody_- can afford to be distracted. It's suicide to be distracted."

"Suicide in a dream isn't so bad." Ariadne offered.

Arthur's face instantly hardened, "It wouldn't be in a dream if we fail."

Ariadne blanched and turned her back on him so he couldn't see her eyes flash with pain. She wasn't worried for herself as much as the others especially because she knew Cobb was getting worse and she suspected she was the only one with an idea as to _how_ much worse.

Arthur leaned forward and planted a soft kiss on Ariadne's shoulder, "After the job."

She turned around and kissed him—before he could react she threw her arms around his neck so he couldn't break the kiss off but he didn't fight her. When they finally stopped they were both breathing heavy and Ariadne said, "We can't mess up the job, then, or there won't be time after the job for us to…"

Her eyes fixated on the bed and her subconscious once again filled the air with orgasmic screams that Arthur smirked at hearing.

Wrapping his arms around her waist he kissed her forehead, "Given how bad the wanting is getting I'm beginning to think that I would be perfectly contented if they shot me in bed."

Ariadne smiled, "I prefer to not be shot."

Arthur pulled away from her and walked towards the door, "And so I'll make sure you won't be. Let's continue to the gardens and hope that your subconscious isn't doing naughty things in some of the nooks and crannies."

Ariadne raised an eyebrow at him, "And what if they are?"

Arthur opened his jacket to reveal a Baretta, "Then someone's getting shot in bed."

* * *

"This is your last lesson before the job so let's make it count." Arthur announced as he sat down next to Ariadne and rolled up his sleeve.

"The last one? Why?"

"Maurice Fischer was just given his last rites. The clock is ticking." He set the timer and laid back against the chair.

Ariadne was in a crowded city walking along the street when Arthur caught up to her.

"Do we ever work in countrysides? Is it always going to be city after city?"

"Tired of them?" Arthur asked and she shrugged, "Gets redundant."

In his dream he was dressed in an elegant three piece gray suit that reminded her a lot of a James Bond movie she'd watched years ago with her father. She looked down and saw that she was wearing jeans and a long sleeved sweater and a cashmere scarf.

"No dress this time?" She asked and he laughed, "Weapons training is today. Dresses tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? Is that a promise?" She quirked an eyebrow at him. They both knew that Cobb dreamed recreationally and ignored it but Ariadne had mentioned to Arthur, casually as he was driving her home one night, that one session of fuck-it-all dreaming might be a healthy release for their subconsciouses before the Fischer job. Arthur had given her a look that was divided between agreeing with her and knowing how dangerous it was for new dreamers to get in the habit of recreational use.

"No promises, just temptations." Arthur almost smiled at her and held out something for her. It took her a minute to process that it was a handgun.

"I don't know what to do with that."

"I'd put it in your pocket before your subconscious decides it's angry about you being armed. It knows it's going to be the target during this round."

Ariadne shoved the gun in her waistband and covered it with her sweater.

"Basic information you need about guns is as follows: handguns are easier to conceal and lighter to carry but they are more inaccurate and harder for beginners to get used to. Rifles are easier to aim and adjust to but there is a clear disadvantage with size and weight. Both rifles and handguns will have a kickback after release and the kickbacks are unique to the model of gun. In general rifles feel like a punch and handguns feel like a push. That sounds strange now but you'll catch onto it quickly. One more thing- safeties need to come off to shoot the gun. Also, don't shoot yourself. This means that until it is second nature to safety and unsafety your gun you should avoid pointing it at yourself at all costs."

"Was I supposed to take notes?" Ariadne gave him the look that reminded him not everyone was a straight A student.

"It'll all start coming back to you soon."

"How soon?"

Arthur brought out a machine gun concealed under his suit jacket and shot at a cab until it exploded.

"Very soon."

She shot him an agitated look, "You could've warned me about all this."

"I could have, you're absolutely right." He shot a dozen more rounds into another car and police sirens started getting closer, "Now try to figure out what Cover Fire is."

It was harder than he wanted to admit—seeing her dodging bullets. Maybe the blessing was that she was dodging them well and not catching them. In his first dream-fight he looked like Swiss Cheese within the first five minutes but Ariadne had caught on fast to use the maze to her advantage. He refused to lead her to safety, refused to offer her cover, because if he was separated from her during a hard time in Fischer he wanted her to be able to defend herself. It hurt him to not help her, it went against his better instincts, but his totem assured him it was a dream and that the worst that could happen to Ariadne was that she'd wake up.

Ariadne sprinted into a nearby building and straight for the stairwell. He followed her and wanted to tell her that he had added a hidden passage but decided that new features of the dream could wait until they weren't running away from bullets.

There was a trick hallway in this building and within minutes Ariadne had led Arthur to a spare conference room that the projections would have a hard time finding. She was panting, rubbing her shoulder to ease out the pain from the gun's recoil, and was studying the hands that had been handling a gun without too many problems not all that long ago.

"I've never shot a gun, how was I doing that?"

"You have the advantage of knowing it's a dream-nobody is getting hurt. It's like a videogame, some part of your brain tells you to just go for it." Arthur nodded, "You did well—excellent job using the maze."

The conference room had desks and chairs and more office supplies than Ariadne cared to detail but no sink to wash her hands or look at her reflection in a mirror. She was tempted to just bring one into the dream but she didn't feel like dealing with the projections yet. Instead she amused herself rifling through the drawers looking for something reflective so she could see the face of Stone-Cold-Killer-Ariadne but instead the drawers of the desk revealed condoms and Playboys.

She giggled at the sheer amount of pent-up frustration and Arthur blushed without her showing him what she found.

"Are you sure you don't want to run some steam off?" She asked, laughing awkwardly, "Can you imagine if during the job the bartender goes to pour cocktails and condoms fall into the glass? What about if Eames picks up a magazine and its porn? What would he say?"

"Eames would be amused, its Cobb that would shoot me on sight." Arthur sighed and strode over to the desk to analyze how bad it was and whistled at the findings, "It's worse than I thought."

"In a weird way that's a compliment." Ariadne smirked and pretended to blow smoke from her gun's barrel, "It must be that a sharp shooting woman is irresistible."

Arthur pulled her close and pushed the safety on her gun, "It would be a shame for you to blow your brains out right now."

Ariadne leaned up and brushed a small kiss against his lips but he pulled away, "Not this close to the job. We've been lax enough already with this."

"Arthur can you just… explain it to me? Is it me? Is it the dreams? Is it the job? What is it? Are you really so afraid of being distracted that you'll risk your subconscious flinging condoms into the middle of a job?" Ariadne walked towards the set of windows across the room and watched the projections start to militarize outside the building. In a world where buildings could burst into existence with the blink of her eye she was willing to let go of certain rules; in a world where the subconscious of other people walked around and advertised how they felt about you she was willing to ask fewer questions. Maybe it was the shooting, maybe it was the impending job, maybe it was a deep-seeded fear that Arthur just wanted to fantasize about her and not actually be with her that was making her bite at him now.

Arthur walked up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist, "I can't expect you to understand how strange it is for me to behave the way I've been behaving with you. I've trained dozens of extractors, probably two dozen architects, and I've never been involved with any of them. They're just a job—in and out. Some of them have tried to interest me but none of them grabbed my attention like you have. You're waltzing around in my subconscious and an occupational hazard of that is sexual attraction gets exposed. I want your body, Ariadne, but don't for one minute think I haven't lost sleep over the idea that if we fail to Incept Fischer then your head goes on the chopping block next to mine and Cobb's and Eames' and Yusef's. Saito can only protect us from our enemies if we succeed—if we fail Cobol will go through with the hit they have on us and you will very likely be caught in the crossfire."

He turned Ariadne around to face him, "When it was just a nameless architect that we needed it was really easy to sign them up for this impossible job and hope they didn't die. It is terrifying to me that _you_ could catch shit for this if it doesn't work and despite what Cobb says Inception has never worked on this scale. Never. I want you to be safe, I want this job to go well, and the last thing I want is to get sex flashbacks when I'm supposed to be focusing. You aren't supposed to come into the dream, I'll have to deal with my frustration some other way but I'm not fanning the flames before a job."

"How is it fanning the flames and not throwing water on them?" She asked.

"I'm only going to want more… I already want more. I shouldn't have kissed you until we were done with this job." He shook his head, "But I find you hard to resist."

She beamed at the thought that Arthur cared about her, that he was worried, that he was so mesmerized by her. Arthur pressed a kiss to her forehead and said, "I really hope you never have to use this lesson."

"I really hope the job goes well."

"Me too."

He lifted his gun to his head, "Time to wake up before this conference room turns into a bedroom."

He waited for Ariadne to unsafety her gun and point it to her own head before counting down from three. Two. One.

_Wake up_.

When they were blinking and in the real world Cobb growled at them, "How'd she do?"

"She's a natural." Arthur replied and offered Ariadne a hand out of the lawn chair. Eames saw the motion and chewed on it but decided not to speak for the time being. Arthur did have a reputation for being overly gentlemanly but Eames couldn't shake the idea that Arthur was giving special attention to Ariadne. He didn't have proof but his suspicions had a horrible habit of being right.

"Arthur, I need you to help me review some of the airline documents so we know everything is in order." Saito called and Arthur nodded, grabbed his suit jacket and coat, and followed Saito out of the warehouse without even a backwards glance at Ariadne. She knew better than to think she wasn't on his mind and she returned to her models with relish knowing that the job was coming to a close. Eames left, and Yusef had been in his hotel for hours. It was just Ariadne and Cobb left in the warehouse and as Ariadne was just about to leave she couldn't help but notice that their tense and nervous leader was dreaming alone.

Surely it couldn't hurt to just…take a peak.

They woke to the announcement that Maurice Fischer had died and Arthur was already walking towards them to start collecting his final notes for the job. Cobb knew, quickly, that his choices were limited to letting Ariadne in the dream or telling Arthur what he'd been doing with Mal all this time. He knew Arthur would pull the plug on the whole mission if he knew, Arthur would be too afraid of Cobb's instability to put a team at his command and the way that Ariadne defaulted to Arthur made Cobb realize that leaving his Point Man and his Architect alone to train had ending up bonding them…against him.

But Ariadne was new and anxious for the dreaming… she was silly to offer to go into the dream at all when she saw the grade of danger Cobb presented but she wanted this job to be successful for dozens and dozens of reasons. Successful, not a surrender. Not a failure.

"She's coming." Cobb said in a guttural tone.

Arthur's head perked up but he was interrupted by Eames' arrival.

"What did you say, Dom? Couldn't hear you."

"Ariadne's coming with us. Make sure Yusef brings enough for her."

The team grew deadly quiet. Saito knew that this wasn't his place to argue and offered to go get Yusef ready to leave and Ariadne quickly volunteered to go with him but Arthur spoke, "Just wait outside, Ariadne."

"Absolutely not, Dom." Arthur countered the second Ariadne and Saito left the room, "She's not coming, she's a novice and this is a three-layer inception."

"She designed it and you've been training her, she'll be fine."

"Dom this isn't exactly a play to be throwing Hail Mary's on…I'm not comfortable with a change this late in the game."

Cobb gave Eames a searing look, "Get comfortable quick."

"This is unprofessional and unsafe, Cobb." Arthur persisted.

"Are you saying you didn't make her ready for entry?"

"I'm saying she's not prepared to go three layers! We're barely prepared to go three layers!"

Eames watched Arthur speak and saw a strange glint in his eye. Arthur didn't usually argue with Cobb or anyone else—if they situation became volatile he would just leave and if other people fucked themselves then that was their problem not his. Arthur wasn't fighting for himself because Arthur wasn't above pulling out.

"Why are you worried for her, Arthur?" Eames asked although the look Arthur gave him was all the answer he needed… this wasn't about the layers, it was about the Architect.

"She's too young and inexperienced for this, Eames. It's beyond dangerous."

"You protect her then." Eames snapped, "Is that what you're getting at? She needs a babysitter?"

"I _will_ protect her but I'm only two layers deep—what happens in the third layer? Does she just get to build snowmen? This is ridiculous—none of us should be babysitting anyone. We already have one tourist and that's more than enough."

"_I'm_ taking responsibility for her Arthur," Cobb injected, "so you can rest easy. I'll be with her for all three layers and I won't let her get hurt. Now goodnight, gentlemen. I'll see you on a plane tomorrow. Make all your final arrangements."

"Already made." Arthur snipped.

"Teacher's pet." Eames whispered and Cobb left without even noticing Ariadne beside the door.

When they were alone Eames looked at Arthur and put all joking aside, "Is this a problem, Arthur? Because I'll shoot her out in the first layer."

Arthur didn't answer and he just walked over to the door and opened it, "Goodnight Eames."

"Goodnight Arthur."

Arthur watched Eames walk down the stairs and then craned his head to find Ariadne hiding in the shadows so she didn't have to talk to the Forger.

"We need to talk." Arthur's voice was cold and Ariadne went back into the warehouse knowing that she couldn't tell Arthur what he wanted to know.

She stood there, silent, and waited for him to ask, "What happened? Why are you suddenly going in with us?"

"It was always a possibility."

"A remote possibility in the event of an emergency." He reached out and put both his hands on her shoulders, "Is there an emergency?"

Ariadne's eyes were pleading, "I can't tell you."

Arthur's eyebrows shot up to his hairline, "What do you mean you can't tell me? This isn't some dormroom secret, what the hell is going on?"

"I can't tell you but if you trust me at all you will understand that my presence is absolutely necessary and without it the job will suffer major traumas."

"It's Cobb." Arthur knew, "How bad is it? What is it? Is it Mal again? Is she worse?"

"Arthur he trusts me and he listens to me but most importantly he confides in me. You will need me down there to keep him honest- please just trust me. If things get really bad for me I solemnly swear to shoot myself or hide out until the timer runs out."

His eyes were strangely soft when he said, "If it gets really bad down there _I'll _shoot you myself. I won't have you wait for the timer to go off-that's way too long in the dreamscape for a first-timer. And in the third layer, when I'm not there, I'm going to make sure Eames is prepared to do it."

"I won't fight you on that."

He stepped away from her and took a deep breath, "I'm never going to sleep tonight. This is such a bad idea."

Ariadne walked up behind him and leaned her head into his shoulder, "Do you want to not sleep at my place? I haven't packed, I don't know what to bring, and I'm scared out of my mind."

Arthur gave a dark laugh, "Two hours ago I thought that my biggest hurdle in this job would be keeping my mind out of the gutter. Now it's the absolute furthest thing from my mind."

He turned and grabbed her face, kissed her hard, "I'm not letting you out of my sight until we're out of Fischer's head."

"What about when we land?" she asked, "We're all so focused on what happens during the job that I don't even know what to do when we reach Los Angeles"

Arthur rested his forehead against hers, "I have reservations but I can't think about them now. Don't worry, Ariadne, I have at least three exit strategies and you're covered in all of them."

She smiled and wrapped her arm around his, "Let's go pack?"

Her suitcase was full with an outfit for every occasion—t-shirt, sweater, hoodie, sweatpants, tank top, bathing suit, cocktail dress and raincoat. She supposed a parka could've been shoved it but then she would've had to take out the scarves and loafers she was bringing. Arthur laughed at her when she emptied a drawer of scarves into the suitcase but didn't tell her she was wasting her space.

"Are you packed?" She asked as she closed her bag.

"Practically."

"Well let's go finish." Ariadne checked her watch, "It's almost two a.m. but I'm wired."

"That's pretty common before a job… my hotel's about twenty minutes from here. Do you have everything? You might not be here again for a few days." _Or a few weeks. Or ever._

"Yeah…everything I want and can carry." She smiled sadly and switched off the light as Arthur got his car keys ready. They went to his hotel suite in silence and he packed, made them tea, and at five in the morning Ariadne yawned for the first time.

Arthur checked his watch and said, "If you want we can grab about two hours of sleep before we need to meet them at the airport. That should give you an energy boost."

She nodded and they retreated to his bed where they laid down together fully clothed. Ariadne nuzzled her head against his neck and said, "This is not how I planned to treat you if I got you in a bed."

Arthur smiled, pressed a kiss to her forehead, and told her to sleep while she could. He couldn't sleep so he watched her nod off and thought about what he had gotten himself into by agreeing to this job, agreeing to train Ariadne and letting himself fall for her. He felt weak, he felt exposed, but right now he mostly felt like _she_ was exposed and he needed to fix that. He felt almost helpless about Cobb and knew at this point there was nothing left but hope that his team could pull off a miracle. Hope that he would get a chance to really be alone in the real world with Ariadne without any of this looming over them, coloring everything they did and said.

Before he knew it he was waking her up and they were getting changed for the flight.

"Remember, we're strangers." He told her before they left the room and just as he was about to step out she squeaked, "Wait! Give me a kiss! For luck!"

He smiled and planted a long, slow kiss on her trembling lips.

"Think that will help?" He asked.

"It was worth a shot." She shrugged her shoulders and picked up her suitcase, "I'll grab a cab, wait to follow me. See you in my dreams."

He watched her go and his face grew hard and serious again- it was time to work.

* * *

The rain was just one thing on the long, _long_ list of things that pissed Arthur off about the start of the Inception. It was raining, they weren't prepared to start an abduction in two cars, they weren't prepared to steal a car, and so far things were off to an incredibly bad start. He couldn't even think about the fact that they still needed to pick up Yusef and Ariadne who had appeared in the dream further away from the rest of the team than planned.

"This is just great… you couldn't take a piss before you went under?" He snapped at Yusef when he hopped in the car and tried to take a breath and calm himself, "Cobb- we still need to find Ariadne."

Eames eyed Arthur. As surely as Ariadne was keeping tabs on Cobb and Arthur was keeping tabs on Ariadne, Eames was keeping tabs on Arthur to make sure nothing was going to rock the boat for this job. Although, to be fair, the boat was already being rocked considerably with or without the Point Man having an uncharacteristic flirtation.

"I know, I'll take care of it….in this weather Fischer's going to be looking for a cab. Arthur you'll drive it, Saito will be keep you company and Eames will be in charge of blocking in Fischer and man-handling him. I will be in charge of finding Ariadne and getting the three of us to the agreed upon meeting point." Even though Arthur knew Cobb was rattled his voice was smooth and sure, his leadership coming across as absolute and unquestionable, "Everyone clear?"

"Yes drill sergeant." Eames rolled his eyes, "Let's heist a cab."

Arthur was driving the cab when he saw Ariadne on the corner. He flicked his blinker briefly at Cobb to signal that the Architect was waiting for a ride. When she slid into the car she barely had time to register everything when the train hit and all the gunfire began.

At the warehouse she tried to pry Cobb off of Arthur when they were screaming about Fischer's training. How could it have been missed? Ariadne thought guiltily that maybe Arthur spent more time training her then reviewing his files but she knew that even distracted Arthur was more qualified than almost every man out there. If Arthur hadn't been able to find this information it probably couldn't have been found.

Limbo. The word hit the air like a bomb and everyone was rattled in its wake.

After Cobb threw the mask to Arthur and told him it was time to shake up Fischer Arthur looked at the mask limply. He strode over to Ariadne, pinned her against the car, and just said, "If you need to hide, _hide_. Hide in the deepest part of the maze. Check your totem every single hour to remind yourself that this isn't real and for the _love_ of _God_ do _not_ get yourself lost in Limbo. Please stay as close to the team as possible and if there comes a time when you have to run _you just run_."

She nodded mutely and reached out a hand to grip the lapel of his jacket, "Just concentrate on Fischer."

"I'll concentrate on keeping this team alive. No one else seems to be doing that." He let out a breath of rage and frustration, "Did you know about Limbo?"

"No."

He nodded as if he was glad he could forgive her for a lot of secrets-but not that one, "What about the train? If it wasn't your design what was it?"

Ariadne just looked at him silently and he kicked the tire of the cab, "Fucking Cobb. I almost want to shoot him just so he can finally go back to her and rot there. Let him go as long as he doesn't take the rest of us with him."

"You don't mean that." Ariadne whispered and patted his arm, "Go help him with Fischer."

Arthur shoved the mask over his head and went in to interrogate Robert Fischer. Eames was priming himself for his Browning impersonation but managed to throw a glance at Ariadne.

"So… it is the extractor or the point man?" He asked and adjusted the shade of Browning's eyebrows in the mirror.

"What?"

Eames suddenly looked at her so seriously that she was afraid of him, "Which one are you in love with and which one loves you? Why did Cobb drag you into this when you don't have anything to do with the job? Why is Arthur working himself into a fit trying to keep you safe? What is it—Arthur has a thing for you but you'd rather chase after the boss? Because let me assure you that Cobb has more damage than even you can fix with all your skills at building things."

Ariadne blushed and stuttered over her answer, "I'm not in love with Cobb- I just… I know he's having problems. I want to help him. I… I want to make sure someone reminds him …"

"Reminds him that Mal's dead? We've all tried to. If you can do it then kudos to you but just try not to muck it all up while Limbo's on the line." The Forger's face softened and he took a few deep breaths to calm himself, "So it's the Point Man then?"

"I don't know."

Eames smiled, "I've never seen Arthur admit to liking a movie, much less a person, and I've sadly known him for years. If Cobb wasn't so wrapped up in his own twisted horror story he'd tell you that Arthur almost going to fisticuffs for you is tantamount to a marriage proposal."

Ariadne smiled and touched her lips as if remembering the kisses Eames claimed were so hard to get. He returned to studying his mannerisms in the mirror like a seasoned actor who had to get into the zone before a performance.

In the van Arthur turned around twice to make sure that Ariadne was fastened securely into her seat with the seatbelt. He'd only checked on Fischer once. Cobb had turned around to look at Ariadne too and she gave him a look that clearly said _No More Trains, Please. _

Ariadne opened her eyes and was sitting on a plush ottoman in the hotel lobby with Arthur next to her. He smirked at her, "Fancy seeing you here."

She tried to make light of the situation, "And you were afraid I'd pop in."

"Well it certainly takes the pressure off my subconscious to create you if you're already here." He tried to smile but his face absorbed a mask of seriousness and he ran his eyes over her worriedly, "You aren't hurt, right?"

"No."

He nodded and she took to studying everything around her…this was, after all, her first job as a Dream Architect. She was flattered to see that her suit was nicer than most of the suits the other women were wearing and she noticed Arthur had added subtle hints of Japanese decorating to the main lobby. _Saito_ she remembered.

"Will Saito be alright?"

Arthur winced, "He'll be in less pain here. He'll regain some mobility."

Ariadne read something deeper in his eyes, "But you don't think he'll make it?"

"It will be very close."

Arthur wanted to reach out and take Ariadne's hand but they were clenched on her lap—the only part of her that showed how stressed she truly felt by the situation were those small, pale hands. He started studying the projections, the setting, and was running through escape plans in his head. He had no faith in the Mr. Charles gambit but it seemed that this job had gone from well-planned to a free-for-all in the last few hours and he was hardly surprised that Cobb had come up with the most dangerous and shakey of scams to run on Fischer now. Hardly surprised but massively uncomfortable.

"If we need to run keep as close to me as possible."

She nodded and he noticed she was looking at the projections as if they were hyenas circling her. Then Cobb strode by, going towards the bar, looking like a man on Death Row.

"Who or what is Mr. Charles?"

Arthur was coiled tighter than a rattlesnake and he was instantly on edge when he told Ariadne the most dangerous part of the Mr. Charles gambit—revealing that they were in a dream. It painted a target on his back and with Ariadne next to him he knew she would get torn apart by the projections right along with him.

Her face was wrinkled with worry but absorbing his every word. He understood that she had gotten herself into Cobb's good graces and might be the only person Cobb was being mostly honest with during this job—and even she had been surprised and terrified to discover that Limbo was on the line. Arthur felt like smacking Dom around for springing that on them, especially with a Rookie in the field, but what good would it do? They were already inside.

The hotel rattled and the projections glared at Arthur. At least he'd shortly be taking his pent out frustrations with Cobb out on them. And what about his buried frustrations about Ariadne?

He smirked and without skipping a beat dead-panned, "Quick, give me a kiss."

Ariadne didn't even seem to be processing that Arthur, Arthur of all people, was asking her for a kiss with Eames and Saito chilling in the same lobby somewhere, in the middle of the most dangerous job any of them had ever done with Limbo on the line. She kissed him and it wasn't until he sucked ever so slightly on her bottom lip that she quit looking at the projections and fully realized him and what he was doing.

"They're still looking at us." She squeaked, lamely, blushing at the fact that she hadn't thought up a better line.

"Yeah, it was worth a shot." Arthur quirked an eyebrow, studied his hands and when their eyes met again they were both smiling ever so slightly.

"Son of a bitch." Eames muttered under his breath as he saw Arthur lean in and kiss Ariadne, "And me without my camera. Dom is never going to believe this."

The Forger shook his head and mentally reviewed every job he'd been on with Arthur and tried to think of a single time where Arthur had been this loose.

_And let's face it—he's really not loose enough. He still has the top button on his shirt buttoned for crying out loud._

Eames let himself chuckle but then focused as he saw Fischer's projection of Browning, _Hello Dolly._

Ariadne tried not to think about the last time she had seen this hotel room with Arthur. She let him explain the explosives, how he would drop them, and felt momentarily silly when she completely forgot that free-fall would suddenly send them all into a gravity-free zone. Just as Arthur was strapping his last explosive to the ceiling Cobb called him—fifth floor.

"Time to work." He tucked the phone into his pocket. Ariadne was looking lost in the hotel, suddenly she seemed much younger and more fragile than she had on the airplane or in the warehouse and he grabbed her arms to pull her towards him, "But first…"

He kissed her harder, faster, and it spun her head.

"I'll keep you safe down here. Try to get in and out of the next layer as quickly as possible."

She looked into his eyes and said the only thing she really believed, "I know you'll keep me safe when I'm asleep."

Arthur caught the fact that she didn't comment about the third layer or Cobb.

Eames watched as Arthur set Ariadne up in the only chair in the suite.

_Not even pretending to treat the mark better, is he? _

When Fischer went under, Cobb followed, then Ariadne, then Saito. Before Eames put the needle in his arm he looked over to Arthur, "I'll keep the heavy fire away from her but while I'm doing that you better hope Dom has his priorities straight."

Arthur flinched as he remembered Mal shooting out his knee because Dom put his gun down for her before protecting his partner. Eames went under and Arthur left the room and _hoped_ a security guard looked at him the wrong way. He needed to kill something, he needed to _do_ something, so that he didn't feel like he was leaving the woman he loved at the mercy of a lovesick madman whose recklessness may or may not cost Ariadne her sanity.

"How am I going to drop you without gravity?"

It was a question Arthur had never hoped to ponder. He'd been chasing around the security guards, and they'd be chasing him, but now he was faced with a challenge he'd never encountered. They'd missed the first kick. They'd actually missed it. Now he was floating around a five-star hotel trying to figure out how to access the only wake-up method left to his teammates—a gravity shift in their inner ear.

He piled everyone on top of each other and tried to keep Ariadne from looking sandwiched between so many strange men but ultimately he just had to swallow the discomfort seeing her like that gave him. He tried to keep her face up in the elevator so that she wouldn't break her nose in the first hit but it really wretched him that he was going to put her through an elevator explosion.

Explosions were not a fun way to die. They echoed in your ear even after you woke and they gave you a weird complex with flashing lights. They stuck with you in a way that shooting and falling never did.

But he was going to make sure he dropped the team, he was going to make sure they woke up, even if he had to maim each and every single one of them personally.

Maybe the truth was _he_ hated explosions. He huddled in the corner of the elevator, fighting the zero gravity, and trying to make himself more comfortable with the idea of plummeting five stories to his death in a big metal box. Nothing really eased him.

He looked at Ariadne's face and swore, even though it wasn't possible, that she whimpered. He felt a twist in his gut that something was not right in the Inception. That something was, in fact, terribly, horribly wrong.

But he didn't have a choice except move forward.

Edith Piaf was calling him home.

One last look at Ariadne. He wondered if he would get the satisfaction of seeing her open her eyes again.

Maybe.

Push.

_Boom_.

The water hit him hard and it tasted like success. He found his air supply by his feet but waited until he saw Fischer and Eames escape to pull it out. Arthur inhaled deeply and looked around.

Yusef was chugging on his oxygen.

Saito was dead—open eyed and stone cold.

_Limbo. Poor Bastard._

Ariadne and Cobb were the only two left. Arthur stared at them and his heart dropped out.

_No no no, not them too. Not them too. _

He stared as if he could force them to wake up. Just as he was thinking about staying in the van right next to them Ariadne's eyelashes fluttered and he instantly offered her oxygen. She seemed lucid, seemed herself, she was signaling that she had enough air and was trying to get out of her seatbelt. It was only when he reached for Dom, expecting his friend to also be awake, that Ariadne signaled to him the thing he didn't want to see: _Leave him._

Arthur obeyed and helped Ariadne escape the van. When they were swimming towards the surface he purposely led her further down the shore than Yusef so that they could talk without him eavesdropping. Panting, soaking wet, exhausted they flung themselves on the rocky shore.

"What the hell happened down there?"

Ariadne began to tell him about the third layer and got to the point where Mal shot Fischer.

Arthur eyed her warily as she paused and said, "But Fischer's awake. Mal shooting him would have put him in Limbo."

"Exactly." Ariadne breathed the word as if it was the entire confession and Arthur cursed, flung one of his fists into the largest rock he could find, and then cupped her face, "So you sent Cobb in alone?"

"I…I went with him."

Arthur's eyes died a little, "You. You went to Limbo."

He kept looking at her as if she might explode, "Where are you?"

"We're in Yusef's layer. We still need to kick back to reality. To the plane."

He let out a breath of relief, "Thank God."

Without caring who saw him Arthur wrapped an arm around her and pulled her against him. They reclined on the stones and let the sun bath them. They just sat there, breathing, until Yusef finally trotted over to them.

"I hate to interrupt but I was thinking it's time to go."

He motioned to the bridge, "Anyone feel like a dive?"

Arthur looked around but didn't move from his relaxed pose with the Architect, "If this worked you realize there's no need to run, right? If we successfully Incepted Fischer than his subconscious will stop fighting us—we won't register as threats anymore."

In their own time they got up, walked around the city as unmolested as pigeons, and eventually walked up to the highest building's roof. Yusef jumped alone but when Arthur and Ariadne jumped they were holding hands. Hands Arthur pressed a kiss to right before they hit the pavement.

* * *

"Which escape route are we using?" Ariadne whispered to Arthur as they fished their bags out of the lineup of luggage.

"The first one." He was still looking very serious as if the job wasn't over. Ariadne supposed for men like him it wasn't but they'd waltzed through Fischer's dream without being attacked and moments ago Cobb had just strode through security as if he was a normal passenger and not a wanted felon. As far as Ariadne was concerned—they'd won.

"What's the first one?"

"A penthouse suite at a very posh hotel in downtown LA. There should be a very nice bottle of champagne chilling for us." He finally smirked, "But can you try to keep your enthusiasm contained until we're away from Fischer? He's supposed to think we're strangers."

"Yes drill sergeant." Eames inserted over Ariadne's shoulder and Arthur actually caved enough to flip him the bird.

"Be warned, Ariadne, this is what Arthur looks like when he's happy. This is as good as it gets." Eames winked at the Point Man one last time and said, "I know I'll hear from you at some point. Keep your chin up."

Arthur and Ariadne made it all the way to a cab without another word. Their cab made it just outside the airport's property lines before she flung her arms around his neck and kissed him.

"This is real, right?" She asked as they paused to breathe.

"Check." He nudged the pocket he knew contained her totem. She shook her head, "I want you to tell me, not the Bishop."

He smiled and tucked a stray hair behind her ear, "It's over, it's done, and this is very real."

"Good enough for me." She grabbed the lapels of his jacket and pulled him towards her for another kiss.

The end. For now.

A/N- R/R and suggest whether or not I should continue


	2. Chapter 2

A/N- a few of you very sweet reviewers convinced me to dabble a bit more. Clearly when you get to the bottom you'll realize that there's at least one more chapter coming your way but i dont think this will become a long project or I'll never finish it.

* * *

The Further Logical Progression

He walked into the rented studio apartment and was hit with a wave of fan blasted air that carried tracing paper and Ariadne's perfume.

"I'm back."

Ariadne had been sitting with her back to the door but as soon as he spoke she stood up so fast that she knocked her chair over. She dashed across the room and jumped into Arthur as if she hadn't seen him in a month. In fact he'd been gone about ten hours but her watch had only moved about fifty minutes. As her weight hit Arthur he fell back but the door of their apartment bent to catch them like a pillow.

"How'd it go?"

Arthur held up a manila envelope and tried not to show the bruises on his hands from where he'd had to smack around a few enforcers, "I got it but it's definitely time to go."

Ariadne looked behind him and strained her ears… she could hear the storm of footsteps ever so far away down the stairwell. In her pocket her totem rested and she knew that it would roll in endless circles if she toppled it over on the table. She'd been watching it circle for about ten minutes before Arthur had come through the door. Ariadne held out her hand and Arthur put a gun in it and held the door open for her as she unclicked the safety and checked the magazine for the number of remaining rounds. As she led the way to the roof Arthur followed behind her and read the contents of the envelope that he had just managed to steal from a safe in the mark's bedroom.

"What does it say?" Ariadne asked as she checked the blindspots on the roof entrance before signaling Arthur that he could follow her. Once he was inside she brought several large pieces of scrap metal onto the roof and used them to block the entrance- the only entrance to the roof- and she sat down on the lonely bench in the middle of the floor.

"She knew that her brother committed the murder, she saw him come home with bloody clothes with the murder weapon in hand and helped him create the alibi he gave to the defense attorney." He handed her the pages and she grabbed his bruised hand instead and quirked an eyebrow at him, "Ah, yes… I had a little problem with security when I tried to leave."

"How was…getting in?" Ariadne asked and tried to keep her voice as neutral as possible. Arthur paused in reading his papers and cupped her cheek, "Can we talk about it when we wake up?"

"Yeah, yeah…of course. Bad conversation for dreamscapes." She accepted the papers and read through them, looking for any details he missed. They both knew that he didn't _miss_ details but the gesture of him sharing the files showed how much he valued her. This job it was particularly important that he show her how valuable she was because he knew she felt uncomfortable at best with parts of this extraction. Within a few minutes they had both read through the file, twice, and they were holding hands, jumping off of the building and hitting the—

_BRIGHT LIGHTS!_

The room was white and bare looking and it took Ariadne a second to remember that Cynthia Marice had been in the hospital to get her tonsils taken out. Arthur and Ariadne had posed as cousins coming to visit and put her under to extract information she was withholding during her brother's trial for murder. The prosecution had asked the Point Man and the Architect to go into her head and see what she was keeping from everyone.

Ariadne brought her totem out and knocked it over on the hospital bedside table. It fell flat, weighed down by the real world, and she looked over at Arthur. He rolled his die and smirked at the four that came face up. He leaned into her and kissed her, "Welcome back, love."

"You too." She stood up and brushed the wrinkles out of her skirt which he knew she had chosen specifically for the job because it was his favorite. It was a charcoal grey silk skirt that she paired with a white blouse and simple black heels. He loved how she looked in it and she knew it. When she dressed like this they looked like a tailor made pair—him in his James Bond custom suits and her in her Money Penny fancy clothes. Arthur stood up and left the flowers they had brought Cynthia as a rouse on her lap. He quickly packed up the PASIV and when the case clicked closed Ariadne unlocked the door and motioned to her watch, "Honey don't forget the meeting with the caterer. We're going to be late."

"Sorry dear." Arthur followed behind her as they left the hospital and looped around Philadelphia for a while making sure that they weren't being followed. Arthur ditched the red Corvette they had been driving in a parking garage and hopped into his private black Mercedes and went to meet the prosecutor that hired them.

Two hours later they were back at their new hotel room in Princeton, New Jersey. In the morning they took the train into New York and from there they were flying into Canada to lay low until the Marice Trial was right. Ariadne kicked her heels off and flopped onto the king sized bed with a sigh, "What a day… she's going to go to jail for aiding and abetting."

"She deserves it at least." Arthur shrugged out of his jacket and folded it over a chair then kicked off his Oxfords and crawled towards Ariadne, "What were you working on in the apartment?"

"New mazes. New cityscapes…. And a lovely countryside with some very elaborate hillsides that we could get lost in easily."

Arthur stretched out next to Ariadne, threw an arm around her waist and pulled her closer, "Tell me about them."

"Tell me about getting let into Cynthia Marice's bedroom."

Cynthia Marice was a six-foot-two leggy blonde and Ariadne had projected the dream as a restaurant. When she had gone into the restaurant's safe nothing was there and she had texted Arthur to say as much. He had left his cell phone on and Ariadne had overheard him turn up his sweet talking distraction of Cynthia until he was invited back to her hotel room. Ariadne had gotten the text of _I'll look in her room safe_ and had instantly gone to the studio apartment. She and Arthur had a longstanding agreement that if anything out of the ordinary happened they would meet at the apartment which was always on the twelfth floor of a thirteen floored building that had a French Gothic façade and was always located on 1st Street. She had sat there and drawn until he came back-many many hours later.

"Well first we had a drink and I tried to talk it out of her but she wasn't budging. She was getting drunk I drugged her but she took a while to pass out. She was in the suite and that means there are two safes the standard and the fireproof and I had to crack them both. She had a lot of stuff in there and the more I found the more the security wanted to pound down the door so I finally got my hands on the right information and then had to play cat and mouse with security for a couple hours." Arthur shrugged, "What details would you like to know?"

"Did she try to take off that skimpy dress?"

Arthur smirked, "She tried. That's about when I doubled her dose of the drugs to try and convince her to pass out sooner. Don't worry I didn't see anything and she didn't even get to pop a single button on my shirt. She did make a grab for the jacket but I sidestepped her."

Ariadne snuggled into his chest and let out a contented giggled, "Sidestepped? Were you also dosadoing? Perhaps there was a brief glint of the electric slide?"

He laughed and kissed the top of her head, "Do you feel better now?"

"Significantly. If she saw you dancing there's no way she'd try to seduce you."

Arthur quirked an eyebrow at her, "Remind me to show you my tango sometime."

Ariadne snorted and buried her head further into his chest. Within minutes she had drifted off to sleep and Arthur looked at her with a mixture of pride and envy. He was jealous she still slept so easily, and dreamed without the PASIV, but she deserved to dream beautiful things without having to worry about who was in them messing around. She deserved the moon and every single star and he instantly wished that it was already tomorrow so that he was at least treating her to a five star hotel and not a shabby Holiday Inn in Jersey.

It had been a year since Fischer and Arthur knew that Ariadne kept the clipping from the newspaper that read _Robert Fischer Dissolves Fathers Empire—I Will Become My Own Man_ in her wallet. She read it before every job they did to remind herself what they were capable of and she often read it after any jobs where she felt they could've done better. She hadn't read it after this one yet and he took it as a sign that she really was letting go of his necessary hotel room visit with an Amazonian blonde. Though she would never admit it aloud Ariadne considered hotels _their _thing and she had never brought back the design of the Fischer hotel in any job since despite the fact that it was still the best hotel she'd ever designed. Arthur understood – that was _their_ space, their time, their beginning and regardless of how clever it was there was more than one good reason to keep something so meaningful and private out of the workplace (particularly their workplace).

Since Fischer a few things had happened to Arthur—Cobol had forfeited the price on his head and he had turned down an offer from Saito to become the CEO of one of the many corporations Saito owned. The businessman had been impressed with Arthur's ability to manage details and execute intricate plans but Arthur had told him what Ariadne had once told Arthur—that he chose to stick with the dreams because there was nothing quite like it. Even though Arthur loved the exhilaration of the dreamscape and was sure that he would do this job until he died he was also sure that he would never again voluntarily put himself in a place where Ariadne could get a corporate hit placed on her from failure of the job. He needed a safer space to use Extraction with a less bloodthirsty lot then CEO's and Big Business Badmen. It was Eames, oddly enough, who suggested that Arthur use his lack of imagination to come to a logical conclusion about how to make an Illegal Job a Safe Job.

"If your thinking of feathering a permanent nest with the Architect you've got another thing coming—you know it's a complete fantasy to think you can have the dream world and the real world. That was Cobb's mistake—you'll have to choose." Eames had said on the transatlantic phone call eight months ago, "But you might consider how to make the job a bit less….prone to gunfire?"

"As always Eames you manage to say the most obvious phrases in the world with the perfect amount of arrogance and charm. I'll consider if it's possible or not."

"What about if it's _or not_, what do you plan on doing? Giving her up?"

"Maybe an early retirement? I've got enough stashed away…." Arthur had looked over at a sleeping Ariadne that night and hoped that she wasn't awake and eavesdropping.

"Bollocks Arthur, we both know you wouldn't know what to do with yourself if you were retired. You're probably getting antsy now and you've only been quiet for two months."

"Fischer only announced the dissolution last week, it hasn't been safe for any of us to work." Arthur let out a breath of frustration, "But you're right, I'm ready to be back in the game. Any ideas on how that's going to work?"

"Keep her on as a permanent member of your team?"

"And if another Cobol hires us and we fail how am I going to live with myself knowing she has a price on her head? No. No more blood sports."

Eames chuckled, "Arthur you're going to have to think outside of the box for the answer to this one. Can you take an illegal job and make it safe? I mean you'll both go to jail for a long time if anyone figures out that you're part of an Extraction team…. But maybe you need to consider who is less dangerous than Cobol Engineering in the world of Lucrative Information Trading."

This had led Arthur to lawyers who weren't his favorite breed but tended to hate getting their hands dirty. Lawyers liked to sue people but they were stingy on hiring hitmen so Arthur had gotten into contact with a few people who wanted to know what their opposition was hiding before a trial. It had only been about six months since he had taken the first job and asked Ariadne to keep being his Architect. She had looked at him like he'd grown a second head and said, "I wasn't really considering any other options except continuing to be your architect…did you think I was going somewhere?"

"Not really," He had ran a finger along the rim of his wine glass and cleared his throat, "But perhaps we should talk about it, make it official - are you going to be my permanent Architect?"

"Yes but here's the real question," She leaned closer to him and conspiratorially whispered, "are you my Point Man or my Extractor now? How big is this team going to get?"

Arthur placed one of his hands over hers and said, "It'll be just us for now and I'll be anything I have to be to make that work."

She had smiled so wide that his chest felt tight and he understood why Dom had done so many stupid things in a desperate attempt to stay with Mal—because women could wrap themselves around your heart so fully that you no longer had a choice about how you felt, you just loved them and you could never forget that fact even if your life was on the line.

Now they had just done their third job and Arthur was wondering if they should dip under the radar for a while. None of these jobs were particularly large or dangerous but perhaps three jobs in six months was too much. He had told Ariadne that they were going to lay low in Canada for a month but he was wondering if he shouldn't extend it to two or three months. Something was eating at his gut that said he needed to burrow into a hole somewhere for a while.

The reception he had planned for Ariadne in Canada was exquisite… so exquisite that it might very well be easy to convince her to stay there for a few extra months. He hoped so… his gut had a habit of being right about bad situations and he had the feeling that he was dangerously close to one.

On the dresser the alarm clock read 2:23 a.m. and he felt Ariadne moan and giggle in her sleep. He liked that he didn't know what she was dreaming, that he had the luxury of guessing, and that she had the privacy of knowing and the choice to share with him what it was when she woke up or not. He didn't have any of that anymore—he hadn't had a dream in over five years. Arthur kissed Ariadne's head again and thought about all the things he didn't dare think about over the last few weeks while they had been prepping for the job.

He thought about what kind of future he had with this strange brunette they'd picked up at a Parisian University over a year ago. He wondered how much longer the awe of the Dreamscape would amuse her before she began to see the cracks in the façade. He might _love_ his job but he also hated certain things—the constant traveling, the never owning anything bigger than a car, the dozens of bank accounts he kept memorized and the stashes of cash he had in precisely 39 locations all over the globe. He hated that he hadn't called his brother in three years and hated that he had never seen his two nieces. He hated that he hadn't been able to fly back to the states for his father's funeral because at the time the United States government had been unhappy with his performance on a job and had suggested he stay in Romania for another month and sort out the mess he'd made.

There were things he loved about Ariadne that he knew would become issues. He loved that she had been so close with her mother, even when she went to school across the ocean, and he loved that she still sent postcards to her. He loved that since she could never send a postcard from the city they were staying in during their stay there that she had a collection of strange and assorted postcards from everywhere in her purse at any given time and they would have dinner and decide which one they were sending to her mother and what elaborate lie about why Ariadne never came home would get inked onto the back of it. He loved that she found humor in making up the stories but he loved how caring she was about people and knew that eventually she would feel guilty about the distance she was creating between herself and her family. He knew that she had a new baby cousin only four months old that she was dying to see because she loved children… he _loved_ that she was so naturally nurturing and shuttered to think what that would mean for them.

Ariadne had told him that Eames had mentioned to her that Arthur going to fisticuffs with Cobb for her was tantamount to a marriage proposal and Arthur had nodded and said, "It certainly communicates my desire for commitment."

He'd bought her a ring a week later and it had been hanging out in a concealed pocket of his jacket for the last month.

He hated that he didn't know if giving her that ring was a good idea or a terrible one. He hated that he knew he really didn't have a choice because he planned on giving it to her during their Canadian escape and he truly hated not knowing if the pending proposal was the thing that didn't sit right in his gut.

It was 3:54 a.m. and Ariadne woke up smiling and kissed his cheek, "Still awake?"

"Always." He stroked her face with his thumb and knew that _she_ could never be bad decision. He might've been a bad decision for her but she was one of the smartest things he'd ever done, "What were you dreaming about?"

"Camels."

"You still haven't forgiven me for that dream have you?"

"It _ate_ my _shirt_ and _spit_ on my _face_…. But this camel was a nice camel. Her name was Camille and she didn't eat my clothes or spit in my face."

"Camille? Oddly specific for a dream."

She shot him a look that said _You're one to mock specificity _and said, "You were the owner of a casino in the middle of the desert and Camille took me to see you."

"Did we gamble?" He asked and thought about his die and how he hadn't rolled it in a few hours. Maybe it was time to check…just to make sure… but he didn't want to interrupt Ariadne.

"No we occupied ourselves a bit differently…" She had a devious look in her eye and leaned in to kiss him.

_No need for a die_. He thought as he deepened the kiss. Whenever he touched her, whenever something surprising happened like a dreamed up camel named Camille or a saucy new maneuver in bed that he hadn't experienced with her before, he knew that he was in reality. He knew because how could he—or anyone- dream her up so completely? How could he ever think that this was anything but the here and now? If he were directing this as a dream he would direct Ariadne to shift her weight and pull him on top of her but instead Ariadne reached into her pocket, grabbed her bishop, and pushed him down on the bedside table without breaking their kiss. All she needed was to hear the sound of the chess piece _thunking_ solidly on the table to know that everything was real. She moaned happily when the chess piece confirmed that she was awake and pushed Arthur flat on his back, crawled on top of him and whispered mischievously, "You never told me if you liked my skirt."

He smirked, "I love that skirt. I _adore_ that skirt. And I would adore it more if it was on the ground."

She laughed and he thought about the tiny piece of circular platinum with diamonds that was hiding in his jacket. He thought about Canada. His gut tugged at the corner of his mind for his attention but he ignored it and focused on Ariadne instead. He didn't get a chance to think about anything but her for the rest of the night. He didn't get a chance to think about anything but her in New York. He didn't get to think about anything but her in their private jet to Canada and he didn't get to think about anything but her for their first few days in Canada (_especially_ after she saw the gorgeous set up in their private rental home).

It was a few days after they had arrived and Ariadne was at the store getting groceries for dinner that Arthur took the small Tiffany's box out of his jacket and looked at it. He didn't need to open it to know what was inside: a small plain platinum ring size 4.5 with a two and a half carat perfect diamond. He stared at the Tiffany-blue box with its pretty white ribbon and wondered if tonight was the night.

Outside he heard the car beep and knew Ariadne was home. He reached out a hand to open the box and showcase the ring when his phone rang.

The caller I.D. showed a country code for Brazil and he snapped open the phone, "Eames?"

"Arthur, good of you to pick up. I need you, it's an emergency, do you think you could come to meet me in Natal by tomorrow night?"

The front door closed and Arthur shoved the Tiffany's box in his pocket, "You have atrocious timing, Eames. What's the story?"

"Can't say but _trust me_ when I say I wouldn't have called you and your lovely little nestmate if it wasn't dire. I know you don't particularly work the same crowd anymore …."

"But?" Arthur prompted.

"It's my ass if you don't come. And I mean that in the Obituary sense of the phrase."

Arthur grunted and said, "Natal, Brazil. Tomorrow evening. I'll come alone."

"Bring her. You'll regret it if you don't—she's the best."

"_Fine._" Arthur hung up the phone and his gut tied itself into a knot.

Ariadne had walked up next to him during the conversation and was limply shifting the grocery bag to one of her hips so she could brush hair out of her eyes, "What's so important about Natal, Brazil that you have to go tomorrow night?"

"_We_ have to be there by tomorrow night or Eames is a dead man." Arthur looked at her with pleading eyes, "Can I buy you dinner after we get to the airport?"

Ariadne put the grocery bag on the table and was halfway to the bedroom calling, "_What's the weather like down there this time of year?"_

To Be Continued.

* * *

A/N- R/R please! Predictions welcome and encouraged : o ) How much more do you want my lovelies?


	3. Chapter 3

A/N- I was considering holding out putting this piece forward until someone told me that they enjoyed the camel named Camille but I decided not to hold my breath! this was going to be longer but i really wanted to keep updating for you guys so I apologize that I've gotten shorter than the first chapter (I'd been sitting on it for about a month so I was pretty sure none of you wanted to wait a month)

The Continuous Progression of the Logical

Airplanes and airports were the second most common location for Arthur and Ariadne to inhabit and they'd developed a system for how they functioned inside of them. Arthur checked in their tickets, found them seats with easy access to exits, bathrooms, and runways and kept a constant eye on the shifting schedules of incoming and outgoing flights in the event of a quick getaway. Ariadne was responsible for keeping their essential documents safe—passports, social security cards (forgeries of both of those in at least four names), money (broken down into mostly dollars and Euros but she had a few other denominations as well), and three throwaway cell phones that had essential phone numbers programmed into them. Arthur kept the PASIV in his hand at all times and had a rule that the totems were checked every fifteen minutes. Ariadne checked her Bishop as she bought them coffee and made her way back to Arthur. An hour ago she had been packing for the trip and Arthur had been making calls to his connections at the airport to see what could be done about a last minute flight into Rio de Janero and a connecting flight to a local airport in Natal from a private jet that had been seriously overpriced.

She took a seat next to Arthur and handed him his black coffee while she sipped on hers and grinned, "Care to play guess the fancy coffee-like beverage today?"

"Too easy. I can smell the pumpkin spice from here. Skim pumpkin spice latte with extra whipped cream." He sipped on his coffee and made small approving noises, "I love it when its Venezuelan beans. They _pop_."

Ariadne smiled at him and ran her fingers through his hair. She knew he was secretly annoyed that his hair was messed up but he loved the sensation regardless, "What about Brazilian beans?"

Arthur eyed her, "I've already been thinking about calling a coffee bean proprietor after we help Eames get out of whatever trouble he's in."

"How bad did he sound?" She chewed on her plastic coffee lid and anxiously tapped her foot. They'd been together long enough that Arthur knew precisely what she was asking.

"He sounded alive and untortured. Rushed, angry, petrified but untortured."

"Well that's always a plus, I guess." Ariadne leaned her head on Arthur's shoulder, "Can we have a torture-optional visit to Brazil?"

"Absolutely." He kissed her head and wrapped his arm around her, careful not to spill any coffee in the process, and hugged both her and the PASIV closer to his body and raked his eyes over the entire flight board and then did a security sweep. He completely intended to have a _torture free_ adventure in Eamesland.

Eames had a relatively predictable pattern of countries he went between where he was likely to get work. A man of Eames' flamboyance was always welcome to certain parts of South America where he often made a small fortune forging himself as rich housewives, local divas, politician's trophy wives and occasionally as salsa dancers (though Arthur had never been privy to that particular con and still considered it nothing more than a juicy rumor likely started by Eames himself). Brazil had been the Forger's favorite haunt circa five years ago but a rough encounter in the dreamscape had led to a famous soap opera star overdosing. Her very famous friends and lovers had told Eames that he was unwelcome in the country and he hadn't been back since but Arthur knew he was constantly trying to get back in. Right before Fischer he'd been offered a fly into Brazil for a job interview and hadn't heard anything until about a month ago. Arthur had received nothing more than a text message that read _Care to go for a full Brazilian with me darling? _To which he had prompted responded _Absolutely not._

Eames might have been funny and seemingly carefree but he was, in fact, a ruthless Forger who was known to play dirty to get ahead of his competition. He was a nice enough guy until he thought someone was moving in on his turf and it was like a switch was flipped and he became a wolf. A lot of the men that hired Eames had similar business ethics to him and the bunch in Brazil had a nasty reputation for sticking palm fronds under people's fingernails. And people's toenails. And into other unmentionable places.

Despite his flippancy Eames was a man of straightforward business—if Arthur had told him that the Point Man and the Architect were passing on the full Brazilian experience being offered than Eames would simply go to the next set of names on his list. Eames wouldn't have called Arthur unless it was a _real_ emergency that only Arthur could resolve and Eames wouldn't have asked for him to bring Ariadne unless it was absolutely necessary. Arthur and Eames might have been friendly-rival-coworkers but Eames had a soft spot for Ariadne and wouldn't have endangered her unless he didn't have another option.

The thing that shook Arthur up was that Eames, the most resourceful son of a bitch alive, considered himself out of options.

Arthur swept his eyes around the room: security, flight schedule, clock, Ariadne, PASIV. All safe. Coffee? Safe but slowly getting cold.

Ariadne slurped the last lick of whipped cream out of her coffee and put the empty cup on the ground. She shifted so that her head rested in Arthur's lap and her purse of important documents was safe on her lap. Laid out as she was she began to doze and Arthur sipped on his coffee and kept sweeping his eyes over all the essentials. It wasn't until he went into his pocket for his current cell phone that he even remembered the Tiffany's box that he had hastily hidden from his lovely lady in a rush not too long ago.

He checked Ariadne and watched her eyelashes flutter in REM sleep. He wondered if she was in REM debt from their recent job. He wondered if she was dreaming about him or their lost and hopefully still untortured English friend.

Opening the box Arthur once more inspected the shine of the diamond and the platinum. He saw the flawless but simple line of the ring and understood that it was the same simple elegance that was in Ariadne's cheek and her eye and her smile and her sketches of her perfect cities. For a month Arthur had been chewing on how to propose—what should he say? What should he do? They had barely talked about getting together at all it had just _happened_. It had been as natural as breathing. They hadn't ever formally discussed Ariadne staying with Arthur after Fischer—he had simply made the arrangements because he knew she wanted to come because they complemented one another. Ariadne never found him presumptuous or rude for not asking her if she was coming with him or not- she understood how natural being with him was, she felt at ease, she felt more whole.

Tonight she had thrown on a magenta cardigan over a purple button down, an orange and pink floral scarf, a pair of khaki pants and her favorite beat up Oxfords. Her nails were dirty with drawing ink from a series of designs she had done earlier in the afternoon and there was a tiny bit of whipped cream on the corner of her lip. To the average person she looked out of place next to him and there were a few people around them who eyed Ariadne as she laid her head on Arthur's freshly pressed pants as if he would kill her for causing wrinkles. They never got looks when she was dressed to the nines but, honestly, he felt like she was more perfect for him exactly as she was right here and now. His vest might have been different than her cardigan but essentially they were using two similar styles. He wore a tie and she chose a scarf but they both never left home without wearing their favorite neck accessories. They both wore the same style of closely tailored pants and Oxford shoes. They both found the same things beautiful.

He found her beautiful—right here, right now. He found their daily lives beautiful and he wasn't sure that separating _one_ day as _the day_ would be entirely in keeping with their relationship. He had never formally asked her to stay with him she had just _understood_. Maybe it was the same thing with marriage. Maybe, in their case, needing to ask meant that you weren't really ready yet. Maybe the ring needed to be given to her the same way he had given her the plane tickets for their first escape after the Fischer job-

One day, while she was sleeping, he had simply put the plane ticket in the pocket of her jacket. She'd found it the next morning and hadn't said anything until she asked him if she could check a bag on the flight as they were out to dinner.

Smiling he remembered how good that day felt- how real having her felt.

_That's it_. Arthur realized and he put the perfect little Tiffany's box into her purse. She shifted when he rubbed her hand after depositing her engagement ring securely into her bag and woke up, "What time is it?"

"Flight leaves in a half an hour." He brushed a kiss by her temple and she turned to give him a real kiss.

"How have you not become mindnumbingly bored watching me sleep all the time? When do you sleep?"

"I'll sleep in Brazil, I promise." He rubbed her back where he knew she tensed up after sleeping on hard surfaces, "And I'm not bored by you sleeping. It's a change of pace from all the dreaming."

"What do you do?" She asked as she took both of their empty coffee cups to the trash and did her own sweep of security officers and eyed the crowd. Arthur took his die out of his pocket and rolled a reassuring four. Ariadne saw and let out a breath before asking, "What do you do when I'm dreaming?"

"Dreaming… well as much as I can. I think about anything and nothing and its sort of like dreaming used to be without the visual stimuli." He stood up and nodded at her, "They're going to board us soon, we should go wait by the gate."

He held her hand and watched through the window as the luggage was loaded into the belly of the plane. Ariadne nudged him and pointed out their bags on the cart, "So you think we did alright packing? It wasn't much notice."

"Remind me again why you decided on bringing six scarves to a tropical environment?"

"For the same reason that you brought two three-piece suits and a leather jacket. It's my uniform and I like it—screw the heat."

She leaned into him and he squeezed her hand, "Vacations officially over."

Ariadne snorted a laugh, "No shit, Sherlock."

* * *

The scarves that had been in Ariadne's Canadian Excursion suitcase had hardly been appropriate for Brazil but it had taken her two days to cave and buy a new silk scarf. Arthur had picked it out—a yellow floral pattern that he had wrapped around her neck and used to pull her close enough to kiss the tip of her nose. Eames had huffed at them and snapped, "Can we all please focus on _me_ for a moment? Point Man—what exactly is your plan for getting me safely out of this country?"

Arthur had rolled his eyes and gone through the plan again. Really it wasn't so hard—Eames had been the only caught member of a team that had failed to Extract some information from a local politician. His captors had agreed to exchange Eames' freedom for an Extraction from the man who had hired him but his boss had more mental security than Fort Knox. Enter Arthur and Ariadne. Arthur had to plan the Extraction and Ariadne had to design them a maze intricate enough to keep them alive.

"Promise me something?" Arthur had asked her within five minutes of Eames explaining his situation.

"I promise not to go in this time."

He nodded and stared at his legal pad, "Then we can help him."

"I'll start on the sketches. I'm thinking a city."

"How creative of you." He smirked at her and she threw a pencil at him.

* * *

"I can't hold the layout." Eames complained as the three of them emerged from another failed trial run. Arthur yanked the sedative out of his arm and kicked over the wicker chair he'd been sitting on.

Everyone was silent for a second—Arthur was staring at the chair he'd kicked, Eames was staring at Arthur and Ariadne was bobbing her head between both of them.

"I could make it simpler." She offered and Arthur shook his head, "We can't do that, we have to be constantly moving in nonstandard patterns to avoid the kind of heavy fire we'll be taking. You make this any simpler and we won't last two minutes. We need to get all the way to the center of the maze _and_ crack into the safe…. No way in hell we'll have enough cover without the maze as is. I could even do with a few additional precautions."

"_Added precautions_?" Eames spit, "I can barely keep all the twists and turns down the way it is we cannot go adding in extras."

"Why doesn't Arthur host?" Ariadne suggested and Arthur shook his head, "Eames is going to get his boss hooked into the PASIV by trading on their existing business relationship. I'll have to hook in after Eames."

"We could blitz him and hook you up first." Eames tried but Arthur threw him an incredulous look, "That'd be like trying to blitz Steve Jobs. We're going to have our work cut out for us getting me passed his real bodyguards as your friend who gets you out of trouble. If I become your friend who gets you out of trouble and then hits Javier Velez with a Stun Gun I'm going to die in a Brazilian prison."

"That would really put a damper on my life." Ariadne squeaked and went over to her desk to try and figure out a way to make the maze easier for Eames. She searched through her bag for something and emerged with a new pencil and got to sketching. Arthur walked over to her and rested his head on top of hers and whispered, "You can't make the maze easier."

"I could always go in and host. I'm a lot less threatening looking than you, security wouldn't try to keep as close an eye on me as they would on you 007."

"No. You promised." He said simply and she reached up her left hand to touch his cheek. Arthur saw the barest glint coming off of her hand and felt his pulse race.

"We can't get married if you are sentenced to life in a Brazilian prison."

He took her hand and kissed it then admired how perfectly the ring fit, "When did you find it?"

"Sometime between when you stuck it in my bag and now." She answered coyly and on the other side of the room Eames was sitting with his head between his hands and couldn't muster the energy to mock them because he was so sure he was going to fail in this job. Ariadne motioned to Eames her voice became very dour, "Arthur please at least test me out as the host and if I fail here in training then we won't discuss it again but we can't bring Eames this close to success and abandon him now."

"If we're testing her I'll be in charge of security." Eames croaked, proving he had been paying attention, "You'll be soft on the future Mrs and I don't have time for you two to make subconscious moony eyes at one another."

Arthur raised both his eyebrows, "Blow up my fiancé and you've lost out on best man."

"That is so not tempting enough for me not to use napalm."

To be Continued

A/N- R/R - more? again I'm doing shorter pieces than the first chapter but more frequently, fair trade? This isn't a Fic fic, its sorta ... multiple ficlets? Connecting one shots? Making sense?


	4. Chapter 4

A/N- I adore that one of you reviewed as Camille the Camel ! Alright so it's a Fic Fic. Acceptance is the first step, right?

* * *

The Persistently Logical Progression

_HONK HONK HONK_

Ariadne jumped out of the street and barely avoided the yellow taxi that was barreling towards her. She had a shopping bag in her hand and her cell phone to her ear but she couldn't remember what she was doing or why she was in the middle of a street in a city. She couldn't remember why it was snowing or why she hadn't put on snow boots rather than flip-flops. As soon as she stared at her feet and wished for boots they suddenly materialized on her and then the entire world around her stopped and _glared_.

She tried to keep moving through the crowd and craned her neck looking for Arthur. Her shiny new ring was displayed on her finger and she felt the weight of a machine gun dangling off her shoulder, concealed by a coat. Ariadne looked for a street sign and saw she was on 1st street. Just down the block across from a coffee shop was her safe house with Arthur and she knew that he would go there and wait for her. Trying not to slip in the mushy streets she hurried to the building and made it all the way up to the twelfth floor without attracting undo attention. Before she could even knock on her front door Arthur opened it and grabbed her elbow, "Straight to the roof, we've got no time to waste."

"Why the rush?"

"It's snowing. Eames isn't feeling very friendly and he's likely to take out his anxiety on us. What did you do before to piss off the projections?"

Ariadne blushed, "I changed my flip flops to snow shoes."

"Next time go into a store."

"Yes Professor Point Man." She huffed to try and keep up with him as he all but sprinted up the stairs. She noticed that he was carrying something under his right arm but it wasn't until they emerged on the roof that she saw what it was: a grappling hook.

"Where did you get that?"

"I have a closet of weapons for emergencies in that apartment." Arthur explained as he readied the gun for action, "I suppose _closet_ isn't really an apt term. Arsenal, perhaps, fits a bit better. On that note: never try to clean out what appears to be my shoe closet the next time you find yourself killing time in that place."

_Great. Explosive shoe closet. Things you never expected to have to deal with. _Ariadne put her shopping bag down and studied her clothing. Now that she had snow boots on she stripped off her coat and had a machine gun, a sweater, a cashmere scarf and jeans. It would all have to do. In her purse she found two Barettas with silencers, checked their safeties, and tucked one into her boot and one into her jeans. She checked the functionality of her machine gun and looked up at Arthur who was aiming the grappling hook at a building diagonally across from them. He knew, as she did, that the one directly across was a trap—it was a building that once entered was designed to never let you out. Even stepping onto the roof meant getting lost in the endless circling paradox that was the building and while projections continued to walk into _Madame LaMer's Restaurant_ Arthur and Ariadne gave it a wide berth. Eames had been trapped in it twice in the last few days because for some reason he couldn't keep all of the traps straight in his head.

Once the grappling hook was lodged into the apartment complex they were aiming for Arthur produced two small steel handlebars from inside his coat and handed one to Ariadne.

"We're going downhill so the momentum should carry us the entire way across but nonetheless a running start should help."

"The building is also shorter than this one so we're descending from thirteen stories to five. There's a veranda on the fourth floor, are we planning on falling into the foliage?" She fired at him and he smirked, again impressed with how quickly she worked out problems and how unfazed she was by the oddities of this life. He didn't have to look at her ringed hand to feel the swell of pride- the two of them were a force to be reckoned with, particularly in the dreamscape.

"Aim for the evergreen bushes instead of the roses and you'll be less likely to cut yourself up. Avoid the fountain, it's too shallow to help break your fall."

Ariadne nodded curtly and backed up to make her running start. Arthur stepped in front of her and pressed a swift kiss against her lips, "For luck."

"We're only training." She winked and with a few quick sprints she was off and he was following.

* * *

Eames' mental arsenal included wasps, rabid rats (which Ariadne knew would haunt her), exploding mailboxes, about four dozen heavily armed security officers and a lot of things that went _boom_. Ariadne had broken her arm (which Arthur planned on punching Eames in the nose for) and Arthur had cracked at least three ribs in the process of getting to the center of the maze. But it had happened. It had happened and when they got to the middle Eames sat there on top of the safe like a kid waiting for their parent to pick them up from school.

"What took you so long?" Eames joked and applauded them: Ariadne's arm was held up by Arthur's bloodied jacket and he had an arm pressing his ribs back into the location they were supposed to be in. They wanted to flip Eames the bird for what he'd done to them in this training session but Arthur, at least, understood that Eames was being practical. If they were really trying to steal from Eames he would have used his skills as a forger so completely in the dream that Ariadne wouldn't have even know if she was talking to the real Arthur or not until Eames had stuck a gun in her face and pulled the trigger. In this dream Eames might have been playing dirty but he was using the type of tricks that are typically taught to men with enough money to pay for lessons on erecting mental fortresses. Eames was putting Ariadne through her paces and he was making it as difficult as he could because if she couldn't beat him then she wouldn't last five minutes against the people they were extracting.

"Arthur I do think that the lovely Architect has passed the test. Beautiful, bold and brilliant—I always _knew_ you would have good taste in women." Eames held up a detonator and asked, "Shall I wake us up now?"

Before anyone could respond he'd already pushed the detonator and Arthur's ears rang evilly with the explosion even after he woke up in the same apartment they were using to train in. He pushed himself out of his chair and stalked away to a table to roll his die: Four. Four. Four. Four. Four.

_He hates explosions_. Ariadne thought as she shakily took her Bishop out of her pocket and watched him slam flatly into the table. Bam- flat. _Smack. _Flat again.

Eames was tossing his poker chip in the air and whistling, "Well, darlings, I'd say that was a successful go, wouldn't you? Shall we start figuring out how we're going to get Ariadne strapped in before my former boss or are you still anxious to call it quits Arthur?"

_Four. Four, four._ Arthur finally cupped the die in his hand and placed it back into his pocket. He walked over to Ariadne and flicked an eye at her Bishop which she was now gripping in her hand, feeling the reassuring off balance of the weight, and he rubbed her back comfortingly, "How is your arm?"

"It's fine. The pain stopped when I woke up." _But the ghost of the pain remains. _

She didn't have to add in the second part. Arthur had rubbed the knee that Mal shot for a week even though it wasn't even bruised. Pain was in the mind and ghosts of it haunted you even after you woke up.

Arthur glared at Eames, "I suppose we have to redesign our story for Ariadne. She hardly looks like the type of friend you would call to get you out of trouble but she has been known to impersonate a lawyer from time to time."

"I have?" She asked, "Are you sure I was in that dream too?"

"Keep it PG, children, or I'll never recover." Eames smirked and clapped his hands, "_Thank you_, thank you, thank you, thank you."

* * *

"Why am I getting dressed two hours early?" Ariadne asked from behind the bathroom door. Arthur was sitting on the bed in their hotel room with his button down sleeves rolled up to his elbows and the most casual pair of khakis he owned.

"Do you remember on the Fischer job how you wanted to fan the flames?" He called through the barrier.

"Mmmhmm."

"I know what kind of lawyer Eames dressed you up as and I'd rather get all the impending sexual tension out of my system."

"You're making me get dressed just so you can undress me?" Ariadne opened the door and felt awkward. She didn't look awkward in the tailored linen skirt and boned tweed jacket. Underneath the jacket was little more than a fancy camisole and the heels were high enough to bring her eye-level with all of the boys.

Arthur let out a breath, "I want to undress you but I'm really just trying to get you to come to the bed and watch a movie while we go through some last minute details."

"This is also reminiscent of the Fischer job." She retorted, "Why aren't we undressing?"

"Because I'm trying to get the sexual tension _out_ of my system. If I can resist you next to me on a bed all alone in a nice hotel room while you're wearing that then there's no reason I won't be able to restrain all the fantasies during the job."

Ariadne nodded and traced his jaw with her finger and said with feigned innocence, "What if I asked you to _Quick, give me a kiss_?"

"The resisting would get harder."

She smiled and ran her fingers through his hair, pulled him down close to her and whispered in his ear, "_Quick, give me a kiss_."

It was a good thing he had attempted this little experiment far enough in advance of the job that Ariadne had time to fix her hair and find a new shirt that was less torn than the first one.

* * *

Eames' former employer's head had turned Ariadne's lovely crisp city into a warzone. It reminded her of Cobb's disintegrating limbo-worldand she walked around with her gun unsafetied as she sought out her safe house with Arthur. He opened the door for her inside and she immediately asked him their security question, "How many couches are in your main hall?"

The security question had been invented when Arthur told Ariadne to beware of forgers now that Eames was in the dream with them instead of peppering it with his projections. Even if Eames was on their team he sometimes forged his own team members to confuse the enemy. She wanted to keep her Arthur's straight during this kafuffle.

"Forty six." He was wearing a leather jacket, tailored pants, and a very perturbed expression, "I haven't heard from Eames but I'm also expecting him to act as a particularly hard-to-ignore distraction so as long as he does that he doesn't need to call me and let me know he's doing well."

Ariadne nodded and asked what the game plan was.

"His subconscious is so well trained that the only projections that exist here are militarized. There's no way for us to fit into a crowd so we just go for the throat and hope it works."

She nodded and Arthur opened the shoe closet to reveal more military grade weapons than Ariadne had seen in one place. He handed her a belt with grenades, two handheld machine guns and a long-range rifle that she slung over one shoulder. She didn't say a word but outfitted them in her existing clothes and watched him. Arthur eased into a leather gun vest with four guns in the front and a sawed off shotgun strapped to the back. He also had a belt with explosives and he lifted up his pant leg and strapped a knife to his ankle.

He reached out his hand for her and they walked down twelve flights of stairs into the war zone.

Down the block a group of fatigued security officers began approaching, "Put down your weapons!"

Arthur unsafetied his favorite Baretta and looked over at Ariadne. She had unfastened a grenade and told Arthur, "Feign right and duck into the bookstore on the count of three."

"One." She pulled the pin and Arthur began to take sweeping strides to the right side of the street, obscuring the projection's view of Ariadne.

"Two." She chucked the grenade over Arthur's head and into the front support beam of a parking garage.

Arthur twisted around, wrapped an arm around her waist, and they both dove for cover in a brick front bookstore. The parking garage's support beam was blown by the grenade and it toppled over and on top of the front line of the projections.

"How was that?" Ariadne asked, "Did we free the road? That's our first major path we need to go at least three blocks down it."

Arthur peered through the dust and nodded, "It's clear enough but keep your gun at the ready there may be a few survivors."

Together they emerged from the bookstore and sprinted the three blocks down First Street and began the winding path towards the center of the maze.

* * *

In Greek mythology Ariadne was the figure that helped heroes defeat the labyrinth. In this myth she had much the same function. She had taken a hit to the head and the entire dreamscape had swerved and blurred as if it were fading. Arthur was sure she had a concussion and was hoping that it wasn't severe enough to make her pass out. The walls were tilting inwards and Arthur took Ariadne's pulse.

There were rumors that head injuries had nasty residual effects in the waking world. He hoped they were just rumors.

"Ariadne! Ariadne!" He gently tapped her cheek with his palm and then held three fingers an arm's length away from her, "How many fingers do you see?"

She paused and squinted, "Three?"

He flicked four fingers, then two, then one. "What was the middle number?"

"Three?"

"Ariadne are you dizzy?"

"I'm fine." She glared at him and said, "We're in the final terrace sequence. We're maybe fifteen minutes away from the safe—_ I 'm fine._"

He knew she wasn't. He knew she needed to sit down, ice her head, and drink a lot of water. He knew she needed to rest.

_BOOM! _A building less than one hundred yards away from them exploded and he threw himself on top of her to protect her from more debris. His ear's were ringing and he helped her to her feet.

Her eyes were glazed and she had to shake her head a couple of times to focus.

Arthur held up his gun, "Ariadne, do I need to send you home?"

"The dream will collapse."

"You avoided my question."

Ariadne steeled herself and shook her head, "It's not time to go home yet."

While they talked one of the enemy projections snuck up on them and aimed a gun. Before he could shoot them half of his head exploded and the couple was startled into looking at Eames.

"This is not the time for couple's bonding." He scolded and urged them both forward. Ariadne was muttering the directions for the fastest way through the maze but more and more projections kept emerging from thin air. Eames was shifting into a thousand different people around them trying to distract the projections, trying to fit in, trying to look like the mark.

"Eames!" Ariadne motioned that he needed to follow her and Arthur as they opened up a manhole on 18th Street and climbed down. Arthur went first and watched as Ariadne shakily balanced on the ladder and several times almost misstepped and fell on top of him. Eames followed them, oblivious to how weak the Architect was getting, and asked, "Why are we underground?"

"Ariadne designed this manhole to open into a subterranean lounge with a secure elevator that will take us to the penthouse with the master safe. I'm going to blow the elevator lines after we get up there and crack into the safe. One way or another we aren't coming back down." Arthur explained and motioned with his chin at Ariadne to draw Eames' attention to the bleeding wound on her temple.

"Oh ducky," Eames cooed, "When did this happen?"

"Doesn't matter." She snapped and began leading the way towards the hidden lounge.

Arthur pulled Eames back and whispered, "She has a concussion… what do you know about head injuries?"

"What do _I_ know?" Eames sounded incredulous, "I'm a forger, you're in charge of details. What do _you_ know?"

"I've never seen a nonfatal head wound… but Cobb knew a Transporter who got beamed in the head, woke from the dream, and dropped dead of a brain aneurism. I also heard some nasty rumors that Talk-And-Die Syndrome carries over."

"I've had two concussions and been right as rain." Eames shrugged but Arthur could tell he was hiding something and pushed him against a wall.

"What have you heard, Eames?" Arthur looked _dangerous_ in that moment. Eames knew that lying would get him a bullet in the collarbone and a broken nose.

"I've seen someone who couldn't pull out of the dream. They were lost in empty unconscious space."

"A coma. They came out in a coma." Arthur paled and his face lit with fury, "If something happens to her I _swear_ to _God_ I will never forgive you and I will beat the living shit out of you in a place where there's no waking up to escape the pain. You brought us into this."

"You _agreed_. Don't threaten me Arthur just look out for her. You think I wanted her hurt?" Eames snapped and pushed Arthur back just to make the point that he wasn't going to be Arthur's punching bag, "Now let's go catch up with her."

* * *

The master safe was _huge_. Corporate headquarters huge. Batcave huge. It took up the entire fiftieth floor but was designed like a bank vault. Well placed explosives (and lots of them) allowed Arthur to blow a hole large enough for him to weedle into alone. Before he went in he threw Eames a look that clearly said _Take care of her._

Ariadne was not looking good. She was pale, she felt weak, shakey, and nauseous. She wanted to go to sleep and take an Excedrin the size of her own head. She leaned her head against Eames' shoulder and closed her eyes but he was slapping her cheek in the same second saying, "Ohhhh no you don't. No sleepytime for you, my dear. You are going to force yourself to talk to me or I'm going to do something to make you stay awake."

"Like what?"

"I'll get creative. I warn you my creativity occasionally involves bodily harm so don't make me get creative."

She pressed her palm to her forehead, "How long do you think he'll be?"

Eames twitched nervously, "How long do you think you have?"

"Dunno. But I'm sensing like its less and less the longer I remain standing and talking." She winced as a wave a nausea hit her, "Eames what happens if we get knocked unconscious in a dream? Do we go to Limbo?"

"No. We don't go to Limbo."

"Do we wake up?"

He crinkled his nose and said, "Course we do, dove."

She knew he was lying but she couldn't tell how much.

"You help him if he needs help, understand? You owe him." She tried to point a scolding finger at Eames but she couldn't tell which blurry shape in front of her was him. She heard Arthur's voice off in the distance calling her name but before she could turn her head blackness crept from the corner of her vision to the middle and she fell to the floor in a heap.

Of course the body evaporated and Arthur and Eames were left staring at the spot where she had been standing. Arthur's whole body tensed and his face turned beet red, "What the fuck just happened? Is she awake?"

"Do you have what we need?" Eames asked and Arthur threw an envelope at him, "Got it. Read it. You probably have a few minutes before the dream completely collapses."

"Where are you going?"

Arthur held his gun to his head, "To check on her."

To be continued.

* * *

A/N- Dun dun duuuuuun. R/R! Hint: We are meeting Cobb next. This is so a fic. Dammit. I wanted a one-shot and you lovely readers convinced me to write more.

Thank you again for all the lovely reviews!


	5. Chapter 5

The Consistently Logical Progression

Her pulse was weak, she was unconscious and he had to figure out how to get her out of a room full of slowly waking Brazilian gangsters. Arthur would've preferred dropping her without gravity. Eames woke with a smirk that quickly faded when he saw Arthur's fingers pressed to Ariadne's neck.

"How is she?"

"Alive. We need to get her out of here." Arthur's jaw was clenched and he pointed out the room of body guards who were taking a more and more intense interest in the group. Eames put a hand on Arthur's shoulder and said, "I'll do what I do best, shall I?"

Eames turned on his heel and walked up to the head of security with a worried expression, "Have you seen my keys? I had them when I got here but now I can't find them?"

As Eames' dazzled them with bullshit Arthur slipped an extra sedative to their boss, picked up Ariadne, and flew down about ten flights of rusty employee-only stairs.

* * *

There was no questioning it now that 36 hours had passed—Ariadne was in a coma. Her breathing was normal, her limbs occasionally jerked, and her eyes were in a form of rapid eye movement. But the eye movement was irregular, instead of her normal twitches in her sleep her joints jerked as if they were receiving minute electric shocks and her breathing didn't have any of the animation it normally did when she was dreaming. He had stared at her for 36 hours waiting for her to change but everything remained the same. He waited for her to shift from her back to her side or roll over onto her stomach. He waited for her to switch from one dream to the next. He waited for her to hit the exciting section of her dreams.

He waited for her to wake up. He waited…

But she didn't change. Not once. Not even a little bit.

Arthur had taken her to his car where he drove around for a few hours until it was dark and then snuck her into a hotel by bribing a bellhop not to make a fuss about him smuggling an unconscious woman into the building. He'd been there ever since. He hadn't eaten, he hadn't changed out of his suit, he hadn't done any greater movement than rolling his die.

_Four. _

_Four. Four. Four. Four. Four. Four. Four. Four. Four. Four. Four. Four._

_ Fucking four. _He wanted to scream, _Fucking four. Fucking four. Fucking. Four._

A knock came to the door and Arthur cocked his head strangely, rolled the die, and when the four told him that he wasn't dreaming he called out, "Who is it?"

His gun was cocked, ready, in case some enforcer or another had come for revenge. Ariadne couldn't run away with him this time and all he heard in his head was her voice in Fischer's hotel _I know you'll keep me safe when I'm asleep._

And he would.

"Eames." The answer came and Arthur sprinted to the door, looked through the eyehole and saw the forger alone and seemingly unarmed.

"Give me a good reason not to shoot you." Arthur hissed.

"I promised her to help you before she fainted. And wouldn't the gunshot cause you way more trouble than hurting me is worth?"

_He's right_. Arthur unlocked the door and opened it wordlessly.

Eames came in and craned his head to find Arthur behind the door. The pristine, precise Point Man looked like hell. He had a few days of scruff, his hair stuck up in a million directions, he smelled like he'd been ignoring the presence of the gorgeous white marble bathroom in his suite, and his palm had square bruises that Eames knew were indentations from his totem.

"I take it that she isn't well." Eames greeted him.

"She isn't waking up."

It killed Arthur to say it – it became real.

"Have you tried everything?"

The punch to Eames' nose came so fast that most people wouldn't have thought that Arthur did it.

"I'm a Point Man, Eames. Of _course_ I tried everything."

"You just broke my nose."

"You asked a _very_ stupid question."

Eames shrugged and cracked his nose back into place, "Fair enough."

Arthur left him and stalked back to Ariadne. Eames followed and found himself choked up with regret that the young, pretty Architect had wound up in a coma because he'd been careless enough to get caught by some very dangerous people.

He knew that he'd promised Ariadne that he'd help Arthur but right now it didn't matter—he _wanted_ to help Arthur. To help Ariadne.

"What can I do, Arthur?"

Arthur twitched and rolled his die. Whatever the answer was seemed to piss him off and Eames threw his poker chip in the air to reassure himself that he was, in fact, awake in this terrible reality.

"Arthur?" Eames tried to pull him out of the fog and when the Point Man turned to face him there wasn't an iota of feeling left in his expression.

"I need you to watch her, to _protect her_, while I find someone who might know what to do."

Eames gave him an incredulous look, "Cobb is _gone_, Arthur. He disappeared. How do you expect to find him?"

"I expect to find his father-in-law and I expect _Miles_ to give me Cobb's location."

"Good luck." Eames whistled and took Arthur's place at Ariadne's side.

Arthur didn't look like he needed luck.

"Take a shower before you set out, will you?" Eames kicked his feet up on the bedside table and got settled for a long term as babysitter.

* * *

Cobb was in his study reviewing notes on Gothic elements of architecture for his lecture in the morning. He hadn't been called _Dominic Cobb_ in months. There were headlights outside and he heard his children cry out that _Grand-pere est ici!_

When the door opened there were two pairs of footprints and the children didn't announce the guest.

"Daddy's in the study." Phillipa said demurely and the fact that she had switched out of French put Cobb on edge. Who was she talking to in this house that required English? Or who did she _think_ required English?

The wood that made up Cobb's floors was beautiful and musical—it was usually easy to tell who was walking on it by the pitch of the creaks it made. The footsteps that sounded out in the hall were both familiar and faraway in Cobb's mind. There had been a time when they were the only sounds he heard on carpeted hotel hallways. They were footsteps Cobb had never intended to hear again.

They were footsteps that paused outside of his study.

"Don't be shy, Arthur, you've probably done a lot of legwork to find me… don't stop outside the room."

Cobb swiveled his chair to face his old Point Man.

"Dom." Arthur nodded and looked around the study. It was different than anything he'd seen Cobb favor before- modern, sleek, with Japanese hints of design. Previously he'd been all about Art Deco and French Countryside… perhaps the change was a good sign.

"Sit." Cobb invited, "I'm assuming this isn't a social visit. I also assume you understand beyond the shadow of a doubt that I _do not_ extract anymore. I _do not_ build… in dreams. I don't dream. At all. So if you're here about work you can pass on the chair and go towards the door."

"It's not about work, but it is about dreams." Arthur hovered and waited for Cobb to consider his words.

"What about dreams, specifically?" Cobb leaned forward and Arthur could see a flash in his eyes.

Once a dreamer, always a dreamer. The love for the thrill of the dreamscape never really went away and people who _retired_ from the life never stayed away from it long. The temptation for the dreamworld was great and Arthur could see Dom wrestling with it.

"Ariadne's in a coma. I need to know how to get her out of it."

Cobb sat up straight and was quiet for a moment while he took in the news.

"Have a seat, Arthur." Dom said at long last, "And tell me the whole story."

When the tale was told Dom sat quietly and looked at the two largest objects on his desk: one a framed picture of Mal and the other a framed portrait of Phillipa and James. Arthur could sense that the wheels were turning in the Extractor's head- it had been a _long¸ winding, _and _beyond difficult_ road to get back to the children. Mal had been the price and she was a steep price to pay for reality.

"You don't need to come in, Dom. I just need to know what to do." Arthur pleaded, "I need to try and bring her out of it."

Dom eyed the Point Man, "How did I miss you two? How did it escape my attention how deeply you had gotten yourselves invested in one another?"

Arthur nodded towards the photographs, "You were distracted. _Extremely_ distracted."

Cobb sighed and tapped his pursed lips with his fingers, "Why do you think I know how to help her?"

"Because it will take a creative and dedicated plan. Dedicated I can provide but we both know I can't achieve your kind of creativity. You were in the business a long time and you were the best at what you did- you _really_ expect me to believe that you were never approached about this before?"

"I was. It was early in my career and I was hardly the best at anything. I saw a lot but ultimately we couldn't revive the patient and they became brain-dead." Cobb looked at Arthur seriously, "There are worse things than waiting and seeing if she wakes up naturally. It may be that she'll snap out of it one day. If we go in there and try to force her brain to do things it might kill her."

"We both know my answer to that proposition, Dom." Arthur kept his cool-toned voice but Dom knew him well enough to sense the steely resolve, "I wouldn't be here if I was keen on waiting. I waited three solid days for her to _twitch _differently and I thought I was going to go insane."

"Insanity and dreams are not good bedfellows." Cobb warned, "If you're losing your grip you're of _no_ use to her."

"I've got a grip." Arthur emphasized, "A _firm_ grip."

Outside a light rain was falling and Dom's children were laughing on the porch. Professor Miles was listening in at the door and knew that if his opinion was wanted it would be asked for—he had made quite a statement bringing someone from Cobb's old life into his attempt at a new one.

"Qu'est-ce que tu penses?" Dom quietly threw over his shoulder.

"Je l'apportai ici. Elle merite un chance pour la vie merveilleuse."

Arthur pretended he didn't understand French because he knew that Dom would've asked the question in English if he wanted Arthur to be involved in the answer. As it was the Point Man agreed with the Professor—Ariadne deserved a chance at getting her life back and he hoped that Dom, _Dom Cobb_ of all people, would appreciate the beauty of a hard-won second chance. Ariadne's only crime was helping Eames- did she deserve to live in blank space for the rest of her life?

Dom leaned back in his chair and Arthur had a fleeting desire to push it back and _kick_ Cobb just to emphasize that they were in reality—that in reality Ariadne was lying on a bed somewhere incapable of anything and it would slowly kill her, slowly shut down her body until there wasn't even a shell left for that vibrant soul to return to if they found it. It had killed Arthur to call his "friends" in the medical field and buy IVs and monitor and all the other medical accessories that he needed to keep Ariadne hydrated and fed and as healthy as possible. It had killed him to look at that beautiful engagement ring limply sit on her finger while her hand bruised from the intravenous fluids she survived on. It killed him to see her look dead but have a beating heart and steady breathing- it killed him to know she was alive but _she_ wasn't there. Her voice, her character, her spirit were all trapped in the emptiness of a coma and he needed to at least _try_ and get her out.

Even to _try_ with any hope at all he needed Cobb.

Dom knew Arthur well enough that he seemed to have heard the silent plea. He stared at the picture of Mal and shuttered before turning his gaze on the picture of his children.

"This is dangerous, Arthur." Cobb put the image of Mal face down on his desk as though she could hear him warn another man against the trials of developing a Shade.

"I've accepted that, Cobb."

Dom nodded slowly and let out a heavy breath, "Take me to her."

* * *

Cobb knew he didn't have anything to do with Ariadne's coma but he knew he had _everything_ to do with getting her into this life. He knew that he had set her up with Arthur and Eames and that some combination of events that were all instigated by Dom had led to her laying in a makeshift hospital bed in a Brazilian hotel. Dom knew that he was responsible for choosing her but how could he have known it would have such wide-reaching effects? He had just wanted her to help him design the Inception so that he could go home…

Like he had with Mal, Dom had ignored the possible side effects of his persuasion and now he had to see them in all their heartbreaking detail.

Arthur, the dull but deadly efficient Point Man, had fallen for her. Eames the foppish and ruthless forger had been invited back into the good graces of dangerous people because the reputation from Inception had convinced them he was worth it. Eames had messed up. He'd called for help and Ariadne had been caught in the crossfire trying to help someone she considered a friend.

Two years ago none of this seemed like a possibility just like it had never seemed like a possibility that Mal could lose herself so thoroughly that she flung herself out of a building.

To say that he had lost confidence in his own judgment was a gross understatement but Dom Cobb also understood when debts needed to be paid. Ariadne, Arthur and Eames were part of a team whose hard work had gotten Cobb the thing he wanted most: his life back. Now they were calling in the favor and it was time to do his damndest to do for them what they did for him.

For the first day he did nothing but study Ariadne and think up every single way he could fail. He dreamt up new and impressive ways of failing. He thought about failing so well that he exhausted the topic and had no choice but to think about how to succeed.

He spent the next day thinking about every different way he could succeed before he even considered opening his mouth to tell Arthur what he was thinking.

"Cobb?" The Point Man had prompted after two days of silence, "Can you help her?"

Dom opened his eyes and stared at Arthur, "Yes."

To Be Continued.

* * *

A/N- Looks like my college French wasn't a total waste after all! Trying to keep feeding the fires for you girls—how are you liking Cobb? I know there's probably split parties over his reality and I did briefly consider him still being in Limbo and Arthur having to rescue him first but frankly poor Arthur's about to go through enough.

How are my Eames fans feeling? Did you hear Tom Hardy got engaged? Eames is off the market.

R/R!


	6. Chapter 6

The Relentlessly Logical Progression

If it hadn't been for Ariadne's colorful scarf bringing out the color in her cheeks and the steady rise of her chest she wouldn't have looked alive. Dom fidgeted as memories of Mal laying dead in a morgue rose unbidden in his mind. For a second the women became one- their pale skin, their brown hair, were similar enough for the illusion to require Dom shake his head. His head went to his pocket, instinctively, for his totem but he remembered that he had chucked it into a lake after he'd finally gotten home to his children. Phillipa had taken it off of the countertop and asked if he had kept it to remember Mommy.

"I used to, but I don't need it anymore." He said, kissed his children's heads, and put the totem in his pocket where it lived until he tossed it into a local lake.

Because Dom never intended to dream again he never thought that he'd need something to confirm his reality. He never really wanted to have to check ever again—he wanted to _trust_ that he was in reality. Trust. Trust was something he hadn't done in many years and he loved reacquainting himself with it.

"Arthur, are we awake?"

"Sadly." Arthur murmured as he read the readouts from Ariadne's heart monitor. It was as even as a clock and he check the numbers of everything—brain monitors, in particular, interested him, "Have you seen these, Cobb?"

"Brain activity?"

"Mmhmm."

The charts showed the same activity as people who were darting in and out of sleep but it never showed the full cycle- Ariadne was stuck in the beginning stages of dreaming but couldn't evolve the dream and she couldn't end it. She was trapped.

"No change in the last…" Cobb searched for a date but couldn't find it.

"Two months." Arthur finished the sentence, "If you weren't so damn hard to find we could've been here earlier."

"Can you blame me?"

Arthur looked up at his old Extractor and shook his head, "No. When she's awake I intend to disappear for a very long time."

"_If_ she wakes up. Don't set yourself up for failure." Cobb warned and he let his eyes roam over Ariadne despite how painful it was to see her like that. His gaze eventually fell to her left hand and he picked it up gently so he could study her ring, "How long did it take you to pick one out?"

"Ten minutes. I knew what I wanted." Arthur sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Ariadne.

"Of course you did." Dom rolled his eyes, "It took me three months to find one for Mal. I wound up buying two and having someone customize it for me."

"Of course you did." Arthur smirked at him and reached underneath Ariadne's bed. He pulled out the silver case that contained the PASIV and tapped his fingers on it, "Shall we get reacquainted? I'm not letting you touch her head until we've thoroughly check out each other's…. _thoroughly_."

It went without saying that if Arthur even smelled Mal's perfume the deal was off.

"As thoroughly as you like, Arthur." Cobb nodded, "I faced my demons, it's my job to make sure you face yours."

Arthur shot Cobb an expression so cold the Extractor fought a shiver, "Then let's get started."

* * *

They were on Cobb's typically faux Parisian street, walking, with coffee in their hands. Cobb inhaled, "Pumpkin Spice Latte? Where's your black coffee?"

"It's Ariadne's favorite drink."

Cobb cocked an eyebrow and Arthur retorted, "Did you expect me to lie?"

"Yes and my job is to see through the lies. If you aren't lying that just means I have to figure out your boundaries are—how well are you actually coping?"

Arthur was listening to Cobb but he suddenly froze in his tracks as he looked down the street.

A young, attractive couple were walking down the street. They were laughing, holding hands, and unaware of everyone around them. The man had his suit jacket flung over his shoulder and his button down shirt rolled up to his elbows over a well pressed pair of khakis. She had brown corduroy pants with beat up oxford shoes with a long purple cable-knit sweater and an orange and pink floral scarf. Of course he had projected her wearing her engagement ring.

Cobb held out his arm to stop Arthur from walking and pulled him onto the sidewalk, "Wait, let's watch."

The man pulled the girl into his side and gave her a long, slow kiss. He pushed her hair behind her ear and smiled at her.

Arthur's stomach knotted up and he felt lightheaded… he had been ignoring how much he missed her and focused on getting the raw materials together to help her. Now that he had the materials he was going to have to face facts.

Cobb put a hand on his Point Man's shoulder, "Don't fight it. The less you fight it, the faster I know what I'm working with, the faster we can get a plan in action to get her out."

Arthur nodded and gestured towards his projection of himself and Ariadne, "Then let's follow them."

Arthur knew what they were going to see before they saw it- that was the benefit of trailing your own subconscious. The downside was knowing that you were going to come face to face with some of those deeply hidden desires and fears.

They were sitting at a café sipping on tea and picking at the dessert sitting between them on the table. Ariadne was refusing the last bite but Arthur just pretended he didn't want it until she nonchalantly nibbled on it. There was something on the table with them; Cobb could decipher maps and postcards. There was a plane flying overhead and Cobb knew that was Arthur's insertion.

"Where are you two going?"

"To visit her mom and my brother. We haven't seen them in….way too long. The families don't even know that—"

"Know what?" Cobb pressed and studied Arthur's face. There was a slight blush in his cheeks as he said, "Our families don't even know that they're going to be related."

The couple left the café and went down the block into a bridal shop. Inside the Architect talked to the woman at the counter and a gown in a bag label _Custom_ was handed over to Arthur to hold while Ariadne paid. They started walking with the dress and Ariadne was telling him a story with large, explosive hand movements. At one point she reached over, grabbed Arthur's chin, and pulled him into a kiss.

Cobb looked down at his left hand and registered that there wasn't a wedding band there. He couldn't help but feel a little sad watching Arthur's perfect projections but he knew that however bad he felt, Arthur felt worse. The Point Man's jaw was clenched as he watched but he didn't pull the plug on the dream even though Cobb could see the outline of the gun on his belt and knew that escape was one bullet away.

They were on 1st street and Arthur was unlocking the front door to their apartment. Ariadne took the dress from him and walked up first. Cobb looked at his Point Man, "Is there somewhere we can go to watch?"

"Security is in the basement, they have cameras." Arthur led the way and shot both of the security guards in the head without blinking. He took a seat after he pushed one of the bodies out of his way and was clicking away on the computer screens to bring up his apartment with Ariadne.

"I don't like that you two have an apartment here." Cobb commented, "Why did you build it?"

"Safehouse, in case there's a problem in the dreamscape."

Cobb shrugged, "I suppose that's fine."

Arthur darted him a look, "Certainly useful right now, gives you something to stare at. How about you start helping me hack this so you can get some audio?"

* * *

Arthur opened his eyes and was in the same Brazilian hotel room he'd been in for months. Cobb was gone, the shower was on and it might have been the Extractor or the Forger but Arthur didn't care enough to check. He was sitting next Ariadne and her monitors were steady. Her hair was breaking into waves in front of her cheek and he smoothed it down.

"How are you?" He asked and sighed. His stomach rumbled and he went to grab the phone to order dinner when it happened. He was holding onto his totem and thinking about throwing it.

She moved her fingers. Out of the corner of his eye he saw it but he thought he had tricked himself. Then her whole hand. Then her monitors went absolutely crazy.

He darted to her, dropping his cell phone, and in his haste he dropped his totem on the ground.

When her eyes finally opened they were panicked. He had waited so long to see her eyes open again and now they were completely filled with terror. Her heart rate was skyrocketing and those hands that had been so motionless were now clawing at the air.

"HELP!" She screamed and he rushed over, pinning her hands to the bed and yelling, "_You're alright! It's ok!_"

She calmed down and clung to him, "You're here! Don't leave again!"

Arthur climbed onto the bed and wrapped his arms around her, "Calm down, Ariadne, or you're going to relapse. I'm not going anywhere."

"Did you get the information? Out of the vault? Is Eames ok? How long have I been out? How did you get me out?"

"_Shhh_." He pressed a kiss to her forehead and rubbed her arm, "_Shhh…_I'll tell you later."

"How much later?"

"After you've been stabilized for at least twenty-four hours."

She rolled her eyes and they twinkled green in the light, she put a hand against his cheek and he focused on what she was saying.

"Did you miss me?"

_That's such a stupid question_. He thought and when he didn't answer she pressed a little harder on his cheek. He noticed that her nails were long, longer than he'd ever noticed them, and he looked at her eyes again.

Green eyes.

He punched the figure in the bed directly in the nose and in the same second Eames took Ariadne's place.

"You son of a bitch, you'd hit a woman?"

"No but I'd hit you. Pay more attention to your details—her eyes are hazel but they're more brown than green. Also she bites her nails."

Arthur flicked his eyes to his totem where it had fallen on the ground and looked at the six on its face. Dreaming.

Definitely dreaming.

Cobb applauded from the bathroom door and walked into the makeshift hotel room with his gun tucked into the front of his belt.

"Excellent, Arthur. Very astute."

Getting up from the bed Arthur glared at Cobb, "Have I passed yet?"

"Almost. We're not done yet but I don't think we need to be in a second layer anymore." Cobb turned his attention to Eames, "You joining us in the first layer?"

Eames held his bleeding nose and said, "Yeah, I'm quite over the broken nose."

Cobb shot Eames first, Arthur second, and himself last.

* * *

In the security room in the 1st Street apartment complex Arthur pulled the sedative out of his arm and looked at Cobb and Eames.

"Where was Eames?"

"You know I was worried that you didn't notice him trailing behind us but you redeemed yourself by being able to violently attack an Ariadne you realized wasn't _real_." Cobb nodded and locked the door of the security office. It was designed like a bunker, in case of emergencies, and Cobb figured out quickly how to get them sectioned off from the rest of the dreamworld.

"Time for another test, darling." Eames said and patted Arthur on the shoulder, "We have to make sure that you're good to go."

"Test me."

Cobb shifted the whole world and it became a funeral parlor. There was a casket up front surrounded by mourners who stopped to glare at the three men who had appeared out of thin air. When Eames picked up a memory card they all resumed their mourning and Arthur didn't need to look at the card to know he was at Ariadne's funeral. Who else would be buried in an orange tweed jacket?

This Ariadne was young, just as she was, with her lovely ring still sitting on her cold dead hand. This Ariadne would never have that regular, steady heartbeat if he hooked her up to a bunch of monitors. He walked up to see her and even though he knew this wasn't real it was so incredibly difficult to move his feet forward.

It was hard because it _could_ be real. It could very easily be real.

Before he could get to the coffin someone stopped him, "Who are you?"

It was Ariadne's mother, he recognized her from photos she had shown him, and she was dressed in black next to Ariadne's aunt. Both women looked miserable and the mother had a glaring look of hatred.

"I'm her fiancé." He answered and held out his hand, "Arthur."

She spit on him, "Some fiancé. What kind of man are you? She meets you and disappears off the face of the earth for a year and when she turns up she's engaged and dead. I didn't even get a phone call to tell me the good news she was just dead with a big diamond on her hand—is that any way to treat a mother? Who are you and what did you get my baby into? How did she die? _What did you do_?"

"M'am I'm very very sorry. Please believe that, I'm incredibly sorry and I wouldn't have hurt her for the world. I'd give anything to bring her back but I can't!" He took a step back from his would-be mother-in-law, "I didn't want her to get hurt! I wanted her to be happy!"

"You think she was happy in the dreams?" The projection was starting to look ghoulish and it snarled at Arthur, "You think she was happy never having a _real_ life again? _You killed her_. You killed her before she died. You remember that, young man. You remember that."

Just as the woman was reaching for Arthur's neck the scene shifted and he found himself in a boardroom. There was an angry CEO slamming his expensive crystal glass of scotch on desk and growling, "Why won't you take the job, Arthur? I got your name from some very good friends who assured me that you were the go-to guy for something this delicate."

"I don't work in the same business anymore."

"Bullshit! My cousin Sammy down in the DA's office said your name is filtering through their files as someone to be called in the event that you need to know what's on someone's mind. How is that any different?"

"I understand that you got my information from past clients but I can't accept the job. I'm out of Extracting for businesses because none of you play very nicely and I've got a family to consider. I'm sure you'll understand."

The CEO was a dark-haired, burly guy that looked as if he could break Arthur in half (and was about to pounce on him and try any second), "Play nicely? This isn't a game. I could lose $2 billion if this merger falls through and I ain't about to risk that on some second rate Dream Hacker. I want you to take this job or that pretty little wife and those pretty little kids you want to protect are going to get a visit from a couple of my buddies who _specialize_ in not playing nice. Capiche?"

Arthur felt a weight on his chest, "Fine. What's the deal?"

The scene shifted and Arthur was in a hospital room again. Ariadne was sitting up in the bed yelling on a cellphone. A nurse in the room was irate and all but throwing around a tray of food.

"Excuse me, sir." She seethed and stalked out of the room.

"_Mom_ I understand that you're _upset_ but there's no way we can visit…. I know…. It's his _job_, mother, and _mine too_….. No I wasn't planning on hoarding your grandchild…. Yes I'm sure you'll meet him before you die….. No I can't promise that you won't die in your sleep tonight but _really_ aren't you being dramatic? …. "

It was then that Arthur noticed the clear plastic crib beside Ariadne's bed. There was a little tiny baby gurgling in it, wrapped in blue blankets, and the nametag informed him that it was an UnNamed Male bearing his last name. The baby was small, red, wrinkly and even though he remembered being repulsed by pictures of James and Phillipa when they looked like this he absolutely _loved_ this small, red, wrinkly thing. Its little eyes were flapping open and they were bright blue right now but he knew they'd fade to hazel. Brown hazel. Probably brown hair too.

Ariadne let out a guttural yell and screamed, "_Goodbye Mother_."

She threw the phone across the room and looked at him, "I was entirely too hormonal for that conversation… next time, you're telling her why she doesn't get to see him. I won't lie about it anymore."

Arthur knelt down next to the crib and traced the baby's little face. It grabbed his finger and he let it hold on. He looked up at Ariadne and sighed, "Are we really prepared to tell her that we're wanted criminals and can't go back to the States for the foreseeable future?"

"Maybe we can convince her to move to Canada. She loves maple syrup."

His heart clenched and Arthur asked, "Do you hate me?"

Ariadne looked startled, "Where did that come from?"

"I got you into this life. I'm the reason you can't go home to see your mother."

She looked like she was going to cry and stared at the baby, "It didn't use to be so hard…. Do you have _any_ idea how badly I wanted my mother here? Do you know how much I missed her?"

"I'm sorry."

"_Sorry_ doesn't always _cut it_, Arthur!" The tears started to fall down her face, "I'm in some third world country without health care hoping that I don't go into labor during a goddamn _job_ and I have to go through all of this—this _stuff_ without anyone here but you and you _just don't understand_."

She wiped the tears with the sleeve of her hospital gown and the baby started crying. He picked it up but she held out her arms, "Give me my baby."

"_Our_ baby." He corrected and she looked at him with an expression so dark and hateful that he hoped to God he was dreaming, "_Give me _my_ baby._"

Arthur handed her the child and saw, painfully, that she wasn't wearing her wedding ring.

Behind him a gun clicked off of its safety.

"Dom?"

"Yeah Arthur?"

"I'd like to wake up now."

_BAM._

_

* * *

_

Cobb opened his eyes and saw Arthur rolling the die over and over and over and over and over and over_. _

_ That was rough_.

"How are we doing Arthur?" He asked and the Point Man just nodded—they were awake. Eames stretched out next to them and locked eyes with Dom who ever so slightly jutted his chin at the door.

The Forger and the Extractor walked into the hallway and had to wait for the room service ladies to stop pestering them about clean towels before they could talk about what they'd just gone through_._

"So…." Eames started, "My vote is yeah. I mean he's still able to distinguish the dreams and he's not replacing her in dreams unless he's projecting another version of himself with her. I think he's still good to go."

Cobb chewed on his inner cheek and tapped his foot, "I'm concerned that in most of the dreams he was taking for granted that she lived. We saw one death, _one_, and there's a decent chance that's how she'll end up."

"Yeah well it'll spare him from dealing with the scary mother-in-law." Eames joked but Dom shot him a look that said _This is serious time_, "Oh come off it, Cobb. Arthur is an innately practical person, practical to his bones, and he's more afraid of what'll happen if she lives because there's more variables about the outcome. Death is death, he can't do much about it."

"Maybe… did you notice he was completely focused on _her_ outcome, not his?"

"Of course I did but why does that surprise you even one little bit?"

"It doesn't surprise me, it worries me. There's a difference."

Eames popped a piece of bubblegum in his mouth and whistled, "You're a worry wart now, Dom? When did that happen? The last time I worked with you I do recall being told _after_ I'd gone under that you had decided to gamble all of our sanities in limbo to get home…._then_ I recall you needing to voluntarily go to limbo because you failed to shoot at a projection of your dead wife. In fact, as I recall, you could barely ever distinguish fully that the projection of Mal wasn't Mal. Arthur can both _distinguish_ that his projections are projections and, best of all, Ariadne never popped in uninvited. What is the problem? What's stopping you?"

"What's stopping me is it will absolutely crush him if we fail." Cobb wrinkled his brow in frustration, "He's not making any subconscious plans for what will happen to _him_ if she dies. There's nothing there. And its what he said to her mother…"

"The doing-anything-to-bring-her-back part?"

"Yes…. I'm worried he'll stay there with her if we can't get her out."

"Worried enough not to at least try to get the poor girl out?" Eames popped a large, pink bubble and Cobb shook his head.

"No…not that worried. Let's go tell Arthur that we're going in."

"He'll be tickled…well you know, as tickled as Arthur gets. He'll be happy. He might even smile."

Cobb shot Eames a look that said _I'm beginning to understand the broken noses you always seem to be getting_.

To Be Continued.

* * *

A/N - Next up- what does a coma look like and how exactly do they plan for something like this?

Also, my Cobb crowd, did you like how I compromised with the realities? With the totem?

Think our boy will be alright?

R/R!


	7. Chapter 7

The Heartbreakingly, Uncompromisingly Logical Progression

Arthur listened to Dom and nodded, "So the answer is making her project in a dream?"

"Yeah we just stimulate her to follow us through… think of it like we're going down the rabbit hole to find her and lead her back out because she's just walking around in circles."

"What if we get lost?"

Dom and Eames shared a look and the Extractor spoke, "We don't know. Most likely you won't wake up when the sedative wears off and you'll be stuck down there…"

Without taking his eyes off of Ariadne, Arthur nodded, "Fine. How do we practice? How do we prepare?"

"Uh, Arthur, there is one thing we wanted to make clear." Eames cleared his throat, "This isn't limbo. It isn't shared space—you get lost down there and the timer runs out you won't just be cut off from us but from her too… there isn't any _staying_ with her in there. Not where she is, at least. From what Cobb remembers there's nothing down there at all."

"And there's no guarantees for what this will do to her sanity." Cobb added and studied the Point Man's expression.

Arthur looked up at them, folded his hands in his lap, leaned in and said, "Her first job she went three layers deep in an Inception she completely designed then voluntarily descended into limbo, navigated it, got out, and _never_ lost track of what layer she was in. Never questioned reality and didn't lose her dreams. You said it yourself, Cobb, that you've never seen someone pick up dreaming so fast—she's a natural. If we can help her out of the quicksand she has a better than average chance of being fine. Still I would like to spend no more time than is absolutely necessary planning this as we've already dallied too much as it is."

"What is your timeframe for _no more than necessary_?" Cobb was processing every shift in Arthur's tone and every twitch of every muscle.

"A week. Tops." Arthur didn't even flinch when he said it but Eames stood up so quickly that he felt lightheaded, "Absolutely not, Arthur. Even for a friend. It's not enough time to prepare for something so tricky and it will take at least a few days to find practice targets and develop the necessary paperwork to get access to them."

"I can have you six practice targets by lunchtime." Arthur promised even though it was only nine thirty in the morning, "Six targets and all of their relevant medical and personal information - which, let's be frank, will be harder to gather for targets than any other prep for Ariadne. I already know all of hers."

"Unless you want to practice on her you'll find us other coma patients with similar backgrounds and health records within a reasonable flight distance." Cobb nodded and stood up, slapping Eames on the shoulder, "Didn't your mother ever tell you that there was _no time like the present_?"

"My mother only told me that because she didn't like to say _Shit we forgot about something, hurry along_."

"Well _Shit_, you seem to have forgotten Ariadne's been in a coma for two months. Hurry along and start planning how to fix that." Cobb retorted and looked over at Arthur, "We don't need six, find three."

"I'll find six and you'll pick three."

"Teacher's pet." Eames rolled his eyes and followed Cobb into another suite to start planning how they would jumpstart Ariadne's dreaming process without getting stuck themselves. Arthur left his fiancé's bedside, went to his laptop, and in under ten seconds already had a fully formed plan for finding the other coma patients who would have to be the test-dummies for Ariadne's rescue.

He tried to pick ones without families in case the ending wasn't as happy as he would like.

* * *

Consuela Signoretti was a widow, thirty-three, no children, who had been struck by a car and had been in a coma for the past five months. She was at a state-run charity hospital in Sicily and it was incredibly easy to get in the door as "therapists" who wanted to try a new technique on patients. In charity hospitals, in charity anything, the rule was that they were understaffed and underfunded at the same time they were overwhelmed with applicants for charity. They were among the easiest places in the world to get access to if you were putting up a very good front of helping them out without wanting anything in return (and if you had excellently forged documents that glowed with impressive names of impressive colleges). Arthur strode in the front door with the PASIV and a white doctor's coat. He wasn't attached to the woman even though her outcome would provide an insight into what might happen to a woman he was extremely attached to. Right now- he was at work, and it was time to put his game face on and do his job.

The principal Eames and Cobb had developed was brilliant in its simplicity- you had to construct a dreamscape that was sturdy but you had to make the coma patient the subject and convince them to populate the dream with their subconscious. Once rooted in the dream the subconscious had to stay involved in the dream by chasing the dreamer and his team in a lesser version of their extraction jobs—they would pretend to steal something but really it was just the focus required in chasing a dreamer that the subject would require to stay with the other minds when they kicked. The idea _was_ to kick- there was no guarantee that the subject would wake with just the timer. The kick would need to be foolproof—a shove of the physical body synced with another kick within the dream. In other words the bodies of the team would all be timed to have their chairs tip back at the same time and it would accompany a musical cue which would signal them that in the dream it was time to find a very high building to jump out of. _In theory_ that method of kicking was foolproof and it was reminiscent of how Ariadne had ridden the kick through three layers of dreaming by synchronizing the various deaths/falls.

"Problem—what if the kicks become unsynchronized or what if the mechanism in the real world fails to properly kick us?" Arthur's job was to point out potential problems and address solutions with the team. His teammates were happy to see that he was on task.

"The answer is simple, only two of us go into the dream and one of us stays here to give the cue and kick the others." Eames offered, "We can take turns practicing and see who gets to sit out for the grand finale."

Cobb turned to Arthur, "That works for me."

"Me too. How do we get the subject to populate the dream if they don't automatically do it?" Arthur continued without pause, "We've never seen anything less than simultaneous creation and experience of a subconscious; we've never triggered it."

"And I think that's why the patients all read like they are stuck trying to start dreaming but never finishing… it's like a car with a dead battery and a full tank of gas. They want to start but they just can't. But if we _jump_ them, jolt them into action, they might be able to maintain the interaction."

"How do we approach that?" Arthur leaned back in his chair and tapped his lips with his pencil, "Is the dream supposed to be seductive at first? Scary? Forceful? Graceful? How do we persuade a subconscious to join a dream and populate it and continue to engage it?"

"I think the best way to engage a mind is to make it focus on you—you steal from it and make it chase you." Eames was eyeing Arthur's feet as though he was waiting for the Point Man to lean his chair legs off the ground just so Eames had a chance to "kick" him again, "Best way to steal is have a simple setting with a safe space- how about a bank?"

Arthur had learned his lesson, though, and the chair remained firmly fixed to the ground.

"Banks could work… a little research into living spaces and neighborhoods could provide a very reasonable basis for a bank." Cobb mused, "We might also set them up somewhere that they feel connected with- something with a lot of personal meaning to them. Usually it's bad to aggravate the subconscious but since that's our aim it might well be the most reasonable way to begin. We don't have to have banks to have a secure location to steal from."

"How do we pretend to steal something without actually stealing it?" Arthur said, "Depending on what the person's hiding we may not be able to avoid stealing it."

"Does that bother you?" Cobb asked.

"Not enough to stop me from doing it." Arthur shrugged, "I'm just posing a question. I don't need one of you feeling guilty that you've stolen Citizen Kane's Rosebud. Not all well-hidden secrets are documents and if someone's secret is an object we'll have to actually steal from an innocent invalid."

Eames clapped his hands and said determinedly, "Can't make an omelet without stealing a few eggs."

Cobb had a moment of feeling violated on behalf of the patients but he didn't have to think about it long- if Ariadne was Mal or James or Phillipa would he feel even the slightest moment of hesitation? Not at all. It was time to realize that sometimes the right choice was an uncomfortable one, "We aren't using that information against the person. We're using it to help them."

Arthur made a few notations on a piece of paper next to Senora Signoretti's bedside. He wrote all similarities and differences she had to Ariadne down so that he could compare them with the other test subjects.

_I hope this works_.

"Carpe Diem." Eames said, "Chop chop, no time like the present, and all that jazz."

Arthur rolled his eyes, rolled up his sleeve, sat on a chair and opened the PASIV, "Get comfortable Eames."

Cobb was in charge of monitoring Eames and Arthur for this job. They were planning on a maximum of thirty minutes in the dream world which would catch them inbetween the nurses' shifts. In and out without questions in the real world and in the dream world it would be six hours to convince Consuela to wake up from the coma she'd been in for the last five months.

The needle bit Arthur's wrist and he leaned back in the visitor's chair. Eames was on the other side of the bed and looking equally prepared for sleep.

"Good luck." Cobb said as he pressed the button that started the timer and pumped sedative into the veins of his two waiting friends.

* * *

The hardest thing about this space was that there wasn't anything there. There was gray _everywhere_. Gray all around. It was almost like being the water because there wasn't any floor or ceiling or walls or ground or sky. There wasn't anything but endless gray. Arthur and Eames were the only things around with definition and mass. When they walked they could walk in any direction, including upside down, without any effort at all.

"This is it?" Eames' voice seemed to absorb into the nothing and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, "It's unsettling."

"Extremely." Arthur arched his head around. Without any definition of space it was hard to determine how they were supposed to find the subject, "Can you project anything as the dreamer? Any settings?"

"Arthur I am trying." Eames looked around himself dubiously, "All I want right now is to have ground beneath my feet but it doesn't seem to be happening."

"I want to find our subject." Arthur scratched the back of his neck and thought about Consuela. He thought about every vital piece of information he had shoved in his mind for her. Birth day, social security, addresses, college grade transcripts, the list of songs that had been on her personal ipod when she'd gotten into the accident that had put her in the coma.

Nothing.

Eames was walking upside-down next to Arthur whistling "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and squinting as if he was thinking really really hard about the dream he wanted to construct. Arthur thought about Consuela's husband. He thought about the wedding pictures that nurses had kept in her hospital room.

Nothing.

He thought about the accident. The news coverage he had found on the internet.

Nothing.

Unbidden, he thought about Ariadne who was lying helplessly in her own hospital bed with Professor Miles monitoring her. He thought about something a doctor told him when the monitors were delivered:

_"I'll see you in a year one way or the other." The man had said as he left._

_ "A year? What do you mean?" Arthur had asked._

_ "After a year you'll want to take her off those machines because she probably won't be able to wake up ever."_

She'd been trapped in this gray space for months and her time was ticking.

He thought of how much she loved this world of pure creation.

And in the distance he saw a floating figure. It was small and asleep and reminded him uneasily of a drowning victim. Consuela had gray streaking her black hair but she looked like she was aging gracefully. Her head was lolling to one side in the floating space and even her hair was lifting upwards as if it didn't have gravity.

"How did you do that?" Eames asked.

"No clue."

Eames walked up to Consuela and flipped right-side up again. He looked the subject up and down and then he reached out a single finger and touched her.

"Eames, don't touch!"

"Why not?"

The gray space boomed and shook and they both stared at Consuela. Without warning her body fell and crumpled onto the... the floor.

_FLOOR!_

Arthur looked around and saw a cobblestone street. In front of them a quaint Italian wine shop emerged with a Spanish restaurant next to it. There was a gelato store and a dressmaker and a little girl with a red balloon licking a cone of strawberry gelato.

"Arthur…do you see that?"

"A projection." He nodded and stared at Consuela. She hadn't moved yet.

"Arthur…the bank?"

"Wait… she has to be able to wake up here or she'll never wake up in the real world."

Eames rolled his eyes and walked over to the gelato store, oblivious to Arthur's tense stare at Senora Signoretti.

By Arthur's extremely accurate watch a minute passed. The little girl started to cry and then an old woman walked over to her and hugged her.

A second projection.

Consuela was still a lump on the street.

Eames was licking his gelato, mint with chocolate syrup, and eyeing the bank.

Two more minutes passed.

Bicyclists passed them and then a grumpy old man came out of the wine shop yelling at another male proprietor.

Three more minutes.

Consuela's eyes fluttered and in a second the world was flooded with people. Taxis, tourists, and people of all ages were in a flurry of excitement around them. Consuela sighed and her weak arms shook as she tried to sit up.

"Here, let me help you." Arthur said and offered her his hand.

The woman looked up at him with blank eyes that slowly understood the words he spoke at her.

"Thank you." She said in a heavy Spanish accent and took his hand.

When she was up Arthur helped her walk over to a café and got her a cup of tea. She looked at everything around her as if she was trying very hard to remember something. She looked at her tea cup for a minute but picking up the lemon and sugar and adding them to the liquid, stirring it, and sipping it slowly.

Arthur left her staring off into the distance and went back to his partner.

"What do you think?" Eames nodded toward their subject.

"She's awake…. Let's see if it lasts." Arthur straightened his tie, "Let's go rob a bank."

The robbery went slow and they made the theft as obvious as possible to attract as much security as possible. As one Barney Fife-esque guard was chasing them down Edith Piaff rang out around the whole world.

_Non, je ne regrette rien. _

Eames made a turn and went back toward the café that Consuela had last been seen in. She was still sitting there but looked less at ease in this picturesque location. Arthur grabbed her arm and she looked at him strangely but couldn't escape from his grasp. He pulled her along until they got to the edge of a cliff at the outskirt of town.

"How long, Eames?"

"Two minutes."

Arthur nodded, "The fall will only take about one so we have to wait. Try not to let the guard shoot you."

"Fall? The fall? What fall?" Consuela asked and Arthur grabbed her by both shoulders so she had to look in his face.

"Senora we are trying to wake you up. We are trying to get you _home_. Please hold this wakefulness."

The woman looked confused and frightened but Arthur didn't have any more time to try and comfort her. Eames grabbed the woman by the waist and placed one hand on Arthur's shoulder.

"See you on the other side, eh?"

And they jumped as Edith sang.

* * *

As soon as Arthur's eyes opened registered that he was on the floor, half spilled out of his chair, and he yanked the needle out of his wrist. Rolling onto his side he rolled his die. _Four._ Four.

He was awake.

"Cobb—did it work?"

Arthur looked around the room until he saw his Extractor and pulled himself onto his feet, "Dom- did it work?"

Cobb held up a hand for silence and Arthur realized he was studying Consuela's read outs.

"Her brain has shifted into the middle stages of dreaming."

"Is she awake?" Eames asked, looking from Consuela to Arthur to Cobb.

Dom slowly shook his head, "No. No, not now. But her stages are slower than yours, its possible she might progress into the later stages of dreaming and wake up naturally… its also possible that she might…"

Machines screamed and flashed and Arthur heard a sound he truly didn't want to hear.

A flatline on a heart monitor.

"She might die." Cobb finished and hastily closed up the PASIV, "Shall we exit, gentlemen, before the lovely medical practitioners find out that we're frauds?"

Arthur stared at the flatline and Eames had to all but push him out of the room.

* * *

An hour later they were on a plane back to Brazil and Arthur finally broke the silence he'd been keeping since Consuela Signoretti died.

"Eames?"

The forger looked up from his game of solitaire and smirked, "Yes my dreary one?"

"Do you think it can work?"

The playfulness faded from Eames' eyes, "I honestly don't want to judge it off of one attempt. We got her involved in the dream but there are other variables. She was older, she'd been in a coma longer, she isn't really a fighter by nature, and we didn't stay in the dream for all that long after we woke her. Do you realize that what felt like a few minutes in the gray space was almost four hours?"

"Eames." Arthur quirked an eyebrow at him, "Cut the crap—if you were me would you roll the dice?"

"Interesting choice of words, Arthur, given that your dice are loaded." Eames countered and shuffled his deck, "Yes. Yes, I would roll the dice. We did something we didn't think was possible and got her dreaming. I think we need to keep trying."

Arthur nodded and rolled his die.

_Four_.

He let out a breath and took out the file on the next mark. They'd have a few hours in Brazil before they took a flight to Florida to meet Mayhew Fox, twenty, who had been pushed down a flight of stairs at a college frat party and hit a steel support beam which had sent him into a coma just last month.

To Be Continued

A/N- Review please! I always read them and have been known to respond to them (as some of you have noticed) so please give me some incentive to keep going!


	8. Chapter 8

A/N- hello dears! a note: this is the last chapter before we get to see dear Ariadne again so thanks for sticking around during the rising action ;) please review to let me know that you're alive out there!

The Obstinately Logical Progression

Arthur had worked a significant portion of his career alongside Cobb and something about gearing up to enter a dream with him made Arthur feel normal in a way he hadn't felt for a while. Eames was whistling and swinging the PASIV back and forth as they walked into the Center where Mayhew Fox laid in wait.

Fox's parents had sued his college for everything it was worth and had gone to Indonesia for a year. Fox was under the care of the best doctors but Arthur got the impression that he was the sort of stuck up brat that nobody had cared about enough to visit in the hospital. When they got to the nurse's station Fox's visitor log didn't have a single name.

"You almost feel bad for the poor bastard." Eames said as he tapped his foot impatiently in the elevator, "He's not even old enough to legally drink and yet he has managed to irritate people enough that nobody even comes to visit. Think they've sent flowers? Or teddy bears?"

"Yeah I'm going to feel real bad that he doesn't have a cuddly stuffed animal when his subconscious security is chasing me down a street and shooting to kill." Cobb scoffed but he was uncomfortable. This was just a kid, not that much younger than their beloved Architect, and his life had taken a drastically different turn. Ariadne had three men that a year ago had been perfect strangers so invested in her happiness and health that they were hacking into other people's brains to figure out how to save hers.

Arthur didn't comment on Mayhew. He was more concerned about Mayhew's brain.

He was most concerned about Ariadne.

Inside the room there was one teddy bear visible, tucked into Fox's arm. It wasn't new, in fact, it was almost decrepitly old. Mayhew Matthew Fox was sewn into its chest in shiny blue thread and it had a threadbare blue ribbon around its neck. Clearly someone had cared enough to put the young man down for his extended rest with an old bedmate.

The bear bothered Arthur. He wasn't trying to break other people's hearts if this didn't work.

The Point Man cracked his knuckles, locked the door to Fox's room, and looked at his partners, "Into the breach, dear friends."

* * *

Cobb was a gentler presence in a dream then he had been in years. He quietly investigated the blank gray matter and looked at Arthur as if he was piecing something together, "Do you remember what you told me? How you found Consuela? You weren't thinking about her."

"No, I was thinking about Ariadne when we saw Consuela. Eames was focusing on constructing the setting."

Cobb's brow furrowed and he folded his arms over his chest, "You know… this might not feed off of conscious construction. All of Eames' effort to make something wasn't worth as much as your pure desire."

"What are you saying, Dom?"

"Just wondering….what is your favorite thing to do with Ariadne?" Cobb broke his serious expression and added, "That isn't going to get us stuck in a porno, please."

Arthur was taken aback and shook his head, "I'm not sure that's the best idea… should we be pulling on memory?"

"What do you like to do with her?"

"Watch old movies." Arthur stared off into the gray, "We get a bottle of wine, stretch out, and watch black and white dramas."

"How did that start?"

"With _Casablanca_. She'd never seen it. After we finished it we began working our way through the rest of Ingrid Bergman's work. Ariadne thinks she's stylish."

"How does she like Bogey?"

"She thinks his suits look too big."

Cobb smiled and started walking, Arthur joined pace with him from force of habit, "Which Bergman is next on the list?"

"_Anastasia_. It's where the average Russian girl tries to pass herself off as a princess with amnesia."

"Amnesia…. Think Ariadne will have that?" Cobb chewed on his thumbnail, "What if she loses the last year?"

Arthur was struck dumb and tried to keep walking but he walked straight into the unconscious body of Mayhew Fox and both of them tumbled to the ground. In an instant the kid was sitting up and had his fists up like he was ready to duke it out with Arthur.

Then he looked around and realized what sort of space he was in.

In a millisecond the world popped into existence and they were on a crowded Miami street around evening when all the clubs were starting to open up. Fox had forgotten about Arthur and wandered off toward what seemed to be his favorite bar.

Cobb cheered, "I _knew_ it! It's your emotions that are pulling them close to you. Their subconscious is looking for something juicy to latch onto - projecting a setting is too unappetizing. You're full of much more scintillating emotions."

"Glad to know that my mortally endangered fiancé amuses you." Arthur pushed Cobb roughly in the direction of Fox's bar, "Get moving, let's talk to the little prince and see if it helps with the kick."

"Were you thinking an old-fashioned stick-up?"

"Why fix what isn't broken?"

Cobb smirked, flashed the bouncer of the bar his ID, and meandered up to the bar. Fox was looking at his beer as though he hadn't seen one in so long he had practically forgotten what it was.

"Hey," Cobb waved, "Mayhew, buddy, first round's on me."

* * *

Talking to Mayhew Fox was easy. The boy started talking with them quickly but Cobb noticed that it was hard for the kid to keep up with conversation. It was like he was talking through a fog and his responses were delayed, his punchlines never fully went with his jokes, and his sentences were just slightly…_off_.

"It's his synapses." Arthur whispered and Cobb shot him a questioning look.

"Synapses are responsible for brain function and they are capable of slowing down, decaying, and getting out of shape. His are just stiff." Arthur muttered, "Hopefully."

Based on the rest of Mayhew Fox's conversation it was hard to tell whether his brain was slow from the coma or whether he was naturally shallow and dull. Cobb looked down at his watch and nodded almost imperceptively to Arthur.

Arthur yanked a gun out of his belt and stuck it against Mayhew's temple screaming, "Everyone get down, or I blow his brains out."

The projections didn't react like normal people—instead of cowering they all glared and police sirens echoed instantly in the club even though that sort of response time was impossible. Cobb covered Arthur as the Point Man yanked Mayhew along until the cliff was in sight. Cliff's were easy to insert and falling always worked as a kick but Arthur found himself wondering if it wasn't quite far away enough to lose the security detail closing in on them faster and faster.

"Cobb…" Arthur warned as the police cars were less than a mile away.

"Wait for it." The Extractor insisted and sure enough within thirty seconds they heard Madame Piaff.

Cobb grabbed Mayhew Fox by the shoulder and shook him, "Do you want to live?"

"YES!" The kid cried, "YES!"

"Then don't let yourself hit the bottom." Arthur winked and pushed Mayhew over the edge and jumped off the cliff right after him.

* * *

On the floor of Mayhew's hospital room Arthur looked up and saw Eames smiling over him.

"Wakey wakey sleeping beauty."

Arthur shoved off Eames' arm and rolled his die. _Four. Four. Four. Four._

"Arthur?" Cobb's voice travelled across the room.

"We're out."

"Is he?" Eames motioned to the boy on the bed. The three men waited with bated breath to see what happened to Mayhew Fox.

"He responded faster to everything."Arthur tried to comfort himself, "He picked up on our presence, he picked up on the world, he got into the world, and he wasn't as stiff as Consuela."

Cobb looked over at his Point Man and was unwilling to say anything that wasn't true, "We just have to wait and see."

Five minutes went by.

Then ten.

At last his vitals picked up and his eyes fluttered and he woke up for the first time in a month. He wasn't coherent and the team came back the next day (along with half the doctors in Florida) to ooh and ahh over the boy's seemingly miraculous recovery.

There was only one problem.

Mayhew Fox suffered amnesia. He didn't remember his accident or anything since. He also suffered partial paralysis in his left side and slurred speech that he was unlikely to lose for the rest of his life. Brain damage had taken its toll and the team had no way of knowing what was caused by his accident or what was a result of their interference.

"Look on the bright side." Eames offered, "He remembers who he is. He even remembers the teddy bear. There would be every chance in the world Ariadne would remember you."

Arthur swallowed the nugget of hope and handed his two teammates a file, "Our last practice round."

"You still want to practice?" Eames asked, "We got him up. He's mostly alright. Isn't there sort of a time sensitivity with this whole coma thing?"

"Yeah and there's another sensitivity—_I'm sensitive to damaging her brain_. We practice." Arthur shoved a plane ticket in Eames' hands and hailed a taxi, "We're going to China. Li Mai Xing is twenty five, healthy, and due to a rare side effect from her allergy medicine suffered a stroke and has been in a coma for six months. She's the closest to Ariadne's age, she's also female, and she's also been asleep for close to the same time. She's our best guess."

Arthur walked down the street to grab a taxi and Eames grabbed at Cobb's arm, "Dom, wait up…. Do you think he's a bit…on edge?"

"Don't you think that was bound to happen at some point?" Cobb hated to be the one to tell Arthur that it seemed like the Point Man's nerves were fried. After all, Cobb had routinely ignored Arthur when he told Cobb that _his_ nerves were fried. Cobb understood what it was like to be at the end of your rope and still responsible for the task at hand.

He knew he'd never in a million years convince Arthur to sit out Ariadne's rescue. He knew because he hadn't been able to stay away from Limbo when it promised him the barest glimpse of Mal.

And since Cobb remembered who had gone into hell to visit Mal with him he made up his mind to watch Arthur very carefully. If the Point Man looked too unsettled then he would sit this one out.

He would sit it out even if Dom had to tie him to a chair and force him to sit it out.

* * *

"I'm sorry I don't think I heard you correctly—_sit this out_?" Arthur growled and threw a glass of scotch across the room where it shattered six inches from Cobb's head.

"You heard me." Cobb said and stood up to his full height. He pointed a finger at Arthur like a disapproving parent and scolded, "You're on the edge, Arthur. We're very close to going into Ariadne's head and you are starting to crack."

"You're one to talk. Your dead wife shot me in the kneecap _more than once_."

"Well at least you know that I'm aware of what cracking looks like." Cobb snipped and backed Arthur into a wall, "Listen I'm going to do what needs to be done here because you aren't in the state of mind to do what _needs_ to be done. What needs to be done is Eames and I both go in and see what we can do. It will determine who the team will be that goes inside Ariadne—you and me? You and Eames? Me and Eames?"

"You wouldn't have the balls to cut me out of her head, would you?"

"I do and I will if cutting you out means giving her the better team."

"Why couldn't the three of us go and ask Miles to monitor us?" Arthur countered and Cobb's eyes turned to slits, "If you're prepared, Arthur, I'm prepared to ask him to do that but if you aren't you _will_ sit out Ariadne's dream as well."

Arthur pulled out a gun and clicked off the safety, "Dom I will admit that perhaps sitting out _this_ practice session might give me a little time to catch up on my sleep and prepare myself for Ariadne. However I solemnly swear that _ I will_ be going into Ariadne's dream. You won't take away what might turn into my last chance to see her. If you try to I will make your children orphans—are we absolutely crystalline clear?"

Cobb held out a hand but stared Arthur down while they shook, "Deal."

* * *

Waiting the half an hour for Cobb and Eames to get out of Li Mai's head was the second hardest wait of Arthur's life—the first being Ariadne's first three days of horrific unconsciousness.

He counted the seconds, prepped Edith Piaff, and moved Dom's and Eames' chairs into the bathroom. He filled the bathtub with icy cold water and then gently positioned both of their chairs horizontally over the tub with the tip of the chair just barely supporting itself against the rim of the bathtub. Li Mai's bed was a remote control—one sharp click and he could have her flung halfway around the world. When the time came he dropped her out of bed and kicked both of his teammates into the water.

Dom and Eames both woke up completely and utterly unamused at Arthur's choice of kick.

"I'm wet." Eames looked at the Point Man as if he was a cat who had suddenly been subjected to a particularly distasteful bath, "I _hate_ being wet. I especially hate _wet socks_."

Cobb cocked a challenging eyebrow at Arthur, "Feeling better?"

"Significantly." Arthur smirked, put his hands in his pockets and strode over to Li Mai.

Her vitals jumped, her heart sped up, and she woke up.

She talked to them, haltingly for a few minutes and they were a bit disturbed that she picked out both Cobb and Eames as men from her dream. She was discussing the horses she'd been riding the day she had her reaction, she talked about the orphanage she'd been left to live in when she was thirteen and also about college she was hoping to go to in the States.

Arthur could hardly believe it. Eames and Dom had done it. They had _done it_. She was awake, she remembered everything, she was _fine_ and she'd been in a coma for six months.

For just a second Arthur thought about Ariadne's eyes, those beautiful darkish eyes opening for the first time in far too long. He thought about how she always looked when she woke up—momentarily confused but always happy when she saw that he was there.

He thought about kissing her again when she was awake and could actually kiss him back.

That's when the first monitor started making funny noises.

Cobb looked over at the screens worriedly and Eames sweeped an arm around Li Mai's shoulders as she seemed to swoon. Then it happened quickly—her eyes rolled back and her body shuttered violently until it progressed into a full on seizure. Doctors swarmed in and the three conmen escaped the hospital but kept an ear on how Li Mai did.

She suffered a stroke and fell back into a coma.

* * *

"We could practice some more?" Eames offered in the airport but Arthur shook his head and stabbed at the salad he was eating violently.

"Li Mai was the best shot and even she didn't really match Ariadne very well." Arthur threw down his fork and stopped pretending to eat, "Ariadne is different than them because she doesn't have an outstanding medical problem or physical trauma as an underlying cause of the coma. Her coma is completely and totally in her mind and her mind is the only thing we're rescuing from that gray pit of hell."

He took a long sip of his cheap airport beer and hissed, "I think she'll pull through. I think the others crumbled physically. I think Ariadne just needs us to find her."

"Do you really think that or do you still have that annoying little skeptical voice lurking around in your head somewhere?" Cobb said through his hotdog.

"I really think that her health is her greatest advantage. I really think that we succeeded in doing to the others what we need to do for her." Arthur stared at the patterns the head of his beer was making as it lost its carbonation and placed his plastic cup back on the countertop where they were sitting, waiting for the flight that would eventually connect them to Brazil, "I also think that we're just going to keep killing people if we practice anymore. I think it's time to try her. I'm going to go insane if we wait any longer and there's really not much more we can do to prepare ourselves. It would take _years_ to perfect this just like it took years to perfect extraction. We've had a week and we've done miraculously in a week."

Dom and Eames shared a look and eventually the Extractor nodded, "This is your call, Arthur. If you say it's time to do Ariadne then it's time to do Ariadne."

Arthur nodded, "It's time."

Even Eames didn't have a witty retort. The men just finished their meal in silence, got onto their plane, and spent the whole time en route to Brazil prepping themselves to enter Ariadne's subconscious.

To Be Continued

* * *

A/N- Review review review! Next up (at long last):::: Will Ariadne Wake Up? Will Arthur snap? Will Eames ever dry out his socks? Dun dun DUNNNN


	9. Chapter 9

A/N- so I now lovingly own the Inception Shooting Script (available at your local bookseller) and have read it twice in under four hours. Fun fact: Professor Miles' first name is Stephen and after Mal's death he and his wife divorced because she blamed him as much as Cobb for Mal's death.

Additional fun fact: originally Arthur and Eames hosted different layers in the inception—Eames was the Hotel and Arthur was the Hospital.

This has been your friendly neighborhood fan.

* * *

The Tenaciously Logical Progression

The night air was cool and crisp in Brazil when Arthur finally found himself in Ariadne's makeshift hospital room. Ever since he'd gotten into the airplane in China he hadn't uttered a single word. He had been thinking very carefully about what Cobb had said, about how maybe he was cracking. He thought about how much he hated Cobb when he found out, while Saito was bleeding and Ariadne was a rookie in the field, that all of them had Limbo on the line. He thought about how betrayed he had felt that Cobb had risked them all for himself.

He felt like if Cobb was saying it was time to take a break then maybe it was.

But it was Ariadne—wasn't she the exception to all of Arthur's fatal logic? His overly put together façade? Wasn't she the colorful chaos that he fell for every time?

Wasn't she worth it?

Next to Arthur, Eames was snoring and Dom was staring at photos of the kids that he had brought with him. Maybe Ariadne was worth everything to Arthur but was she worth everything to his partners? Was he being fair?

He rubbed his eyes and looked down at Ariadne. Miles was still sitting next to her reading from _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_ in its original French. When he saw that Arthur was looking at him the professor paused and said, "She likes the cathedrals in Paris."

"I know." Arthur nodded and pulled up a chair across from the old Dream Architect so that their own lovely version of sleeping beauty was between them, keeping them grounded in this world, "Stephen—I need to know if you think that my going into her head is a good idea."

Miles was taken aback and put down Ariadne's book, petting her shoulder apologetically as he did, and studied Arthur, "You know I've never heard you ask a question about your ideas being good. You usually run on the assumption that you're right and most other people's ideas are to be treated like an untrained puppy on a new carpet."

"I'm being sincere, Stephen…" Arthur looked at Ariadne's face and flipped his chair around so that he could lean his chin on the backboard and still look at the Professor, "I was there the night you fought with Mal about experimenting and I was the first one to run a job with them after Limbo. I was the first one to see Cobb after she died and I was also the only one of that group not originally trained by you or related to you."

"What's your point?"

"My point is that you should have an unbiased opinion of me and I'd like to hear it… the unabridged version, if you please. I need to know if it's for the best that I sit out and trust her fate to Cobb and Eames."

Stephen Miles reclined in his chair and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, "Mal was a tragedy. So was Dom. I once gave them some advice that I swore never to give a dreamer again and yet it is coming readily to mind here and now. In spite of the risks I think it might be worth sharing. _La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure. _That's French for-"

"_The strongest reason is always the best_." Arthur looked up at Miles' face and saw him smile.

"Quite right, quite right. I once told Mal that if she had an excellent reason for all her experiments then she should keep doing them. But it had to be an _excellent_ reason or else it was a bad idea."

"Did you think she had an excellent reason?" Arthur asked and Miles' face fell.

"She had a good one. Just not good enough." Stephen Miles stood up and stretched out his lower back before bending over and kissing Ariadne's forehead, "But I think you have quite an excellent reason for making sure the best man is on the job. Dom always told me you were the best, even on your worst days, and as I recall you dreamers all work well under pressure. I'm sure that as the candle burns down you'll find your answer but it will come to you on your own."

Miles got up and walked to the balcony of the room. Outside Dom was flying tiny paper airplanes into the mild night air.

"_Vouloir, c'est pouvoir._" Miles whispered to him, "Don't get in his way if he decides to go."

"You think that's the best idea? Him going?" Dom asked as he folded an index card into another miniature airplane.

"You're an architect, Dom, I'm surprised at you. Arthur's travelled a winding road to get here and now the road is at a river. He'll build a bridge over that troubling water with his bare hands in one single night or he'll drown the lot of you in the attempt to ford it. Don't you understand? You'll never be done with this if he doesn't get to help her _on his own terms_."

"He's acting like a fool."

Miles stared at Dom and a loving smile erupted on his face, "I knew a fool once that was very like Arthur."

Cobb searched his eyes, "Who?"

"Me. You. Mal… all of us. We all loved something enough to do something crazy and _dangerous _for it despite other people telling us it was a foolish idea. Most of the time it ends up that we get to laugh at them for being narrow-minded."

"And the other times we have to bury our wives and daughters."

Miles looked out at the last glimpse of the sunset and held back a tear for his beautiful baby girl, "Yes… yes sometimes we have to do that."

Cobb saluted Miles with another airplane and said, "Here's to hoping it's the latter."

The airplane flew so far that the two men lost sight of it.

* * *

"Ariadne," Arthur whispered when he was alone with her, "Promise me you'll die quickly if it goes wrong. I can't watch you suffer anymore. Promise me if you can't make it that you'll tell your body to just shut off, like a switch, so I don't have to watch it crumble."

He leaned in and placed his arms on either side of her head. Leaning down he kissed her cheek and let his head slump against hers as if he was too tired to right himself. He stayed like that for quite a while and Eames, who had been soaking in the bathtub to warm his cold feet, felt like he'd intruded on some very private moment by overhearing.

The forger's socks were laid over the heating vent to dry because it seemed that no matter how many times Eames' packed for jobs he never packed enough socks and had been stuck with the wet ones for much longer than he liked. He'd been taking a bath and reading a little Austen when he heard the Point Man talking to the sleeping Architect. When the bath water was gone and Eames was wrapped in a warm robe and his toasty warm socks were back on his feet he walked into the room to find Arthur had weedled his way next to Ariadne on the bed. He was curled around her side with his head against hers, one arm pillowing his head, and the other holding her bejeweled hand.

Tiptoeing so as not to wake Arthur, Eames made his way onto the balcony with the rest of his team.

"You know, I'd forgotten they were engaged at some point. It's like it just sort of flittered to the back of my mind and didn't emerge again until about thirty seconds ago." Eames announced and started unfolding one of Cobb's airplanes to see how it was made.

"I know." Cobb nodded, "It feels foreign—Arthur so caught up with someone."

"Arthur's positively besotted." Eames elaborated, "I once saw him leave an entire suitcase full of custom Armani suits at an airport because he thought the mark recognized the bag. He walked away from Armani and yet he dragged us all over the globe this week trying to save some bird that flew into his life a year ago."

Eames turned to Miles, "Good pick, Professor."

Miles shrugged, "I seem to inadvertently match up most of my protégés, perhaps it's my true talent."

"Arthur deserves it." Cobb added, "He needs something in his life more exciting than his impressive collection of hotel receipts."

"Now now, Dom, let's not sell him short." Eames scolded as he tried to re-fold the airplane, "I heard there was a tie collection as well."

Stephen rolled his eyes, "It's a gift, what he has, and neither of you should be scoffing at it."

Cobb remained sheepishly silent and Eames sighed and tried to fly his plane. It crashed before it flew six inches.

The forger sighed, "Time for a last night of rest before the dreaming. Good night, my dears. May it be a bright tomorrow."

Cobb watched Eames walk on his tiptoes so as not to disturb Arthur and he knew that the forger felt precisely like he did—that tomorrow they put it all on the line to help their friend because, particularly in their line of work, what Arthur had found was special and it was worth going to hell for.

Going to hell and, hopefully, coming back. With company.

* * *

In the morning Cobb found Arthur standing on the balcony sipping a steaming mug of black coffee. He was wearing a plain pastel pink button down that was rolled up to his elbows and had three popped open buttons by his neck, plain khakis with a nondescript brown belt and brown shoes completed the look. No tie. Cobb had never, in all the time he'd known Arthur, see him so dressed down.

"Good morning." Cobb walked up next to him and took a deep breath of that just-after-dawn air.

"Morning." Arthur look a long swig of his coffee, "Sleep well?"

"Yeah I grabbed a few solid hours." Dom tried to give Arthur a casual once over but Arthur recognized it as a deeper inspection of the Point Man's state, "How about you?"

"I fell asleep around seven, woke up around four. I've been out here thinking ever since." Arthur took another slow sip of his coffee and looked at his shoes, "I need to go in, Dom. I need to. I'll never get a restful night's sleep again if I don't; especially if she doesn't wake up because all I'll do is blame myself for not trying. For not having the composure to try and the brains to give you free reign to veto that decision at any time that it seems I'm more of a liability than a help."

Cobb considered the words and nodded, "Alright then."

Eames had been listening in from the room and walked over, clapping both of them on the shoulders, "Forward the Light Brigade, then?"

Arthur nodded, "Into the jaws of Death and the mouth of Hell."

"And home again." Cobb amended.

The three men stalked inside and found Professor Miles prepping the PASIV and Ariadne for the final challenge.

* * *

"It's tested, cleaned and ready to go." Miles said as he wiped the shiny briefcase with a sham-rag and looked up at Arthur, "Pristine condition—I would expect as much from you."

"Thank you." Arthur smirked and went to his satchel, pulling out some clear vials with a thick translucent goop inside, "Somnacin. Pure, unadulterated, and enough to leave us under for about six hours."

"That's seventy two hours to get Ariadne awake—why so long?" Miles flicked Dom a look that was clearly worried about the length of time Arthur had prepped for them to remain under.

"Just a precaution. If it doesn't take that long we'll come home." Arthur handed the vials to Miles and sat in a chair next to Ariadne's bed and dabbed his wrist with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol, "Shall we?"

He swabbed Ariadne's wrist as well and saw Cobb and Eames both take a seat and ready themselves for the injection. Miles went to give Cobb the line to be the host but Dom shook his head, "Give it to Arthur. She'll be more likely to come out for him anyway."

Arthur quietly nodded his thanks and Eames breathed a sigh of relief—for a moment Arthur looked like the same mild-mannered prick Eames remembered.

Within seconds Arthur and Ariadne were both hooked up to the machine and Arthur's head lolled onto his chest. Miles turned to Dom and Eames, "Ready?"

"Hit me with your best shot." Eames winked and as the drug raced through his veins his head fell backwards.

"Dominic?" The way that Miles intoned the question reminded Dom of a time years ago when he had just been a student in Paris who wanted to learn to build beautiful things. He had always drawn the most elaborate blueprints and pitched mythically evocative projects but most of them would be far too expensive and risky to build in their world. Seeing this talent Professor Miles had asked him to stay after class one day and had talked to him a little about dreams.

"Professor?" Dom hadn't called Miles that in… at least ten years and Miles took a step back when he heard it.

"Yes?"

"The first time you put me under-do you remember it?"

"You were afraid of needles and broke out into a cold sweat."

"Yes… you recited O'Shaughnessy and put in the needle while I was busy listening. What was the poem?"

Miles smiled, "Still afraid of needles, Dom?"

"No but I just… I want to go into this dream with something hopeful. What was the poem?"

The Professor's face brightened and he put a tender hand on Dom's shoulder, "We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams…"

Dom closed his eyes and listened to Miles' voice. Mal used to recite the same poem to their children to help them fall asleep, "Wandering lone by the sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams, World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams, Yet we are the movers and shakers, Of the world for ever, it seems."

When Dom opened his eyes again he was floating in the gray space and Arthur smirked, "Why is O'Shaugnessy echoing?"

"A little send off from Miles. Any sign of her?"

* * *

Arthur had been alone in the gray space for a few minutes before Eames had appeared and it was a few minutes more before Dom had shown up. Arthur wouldn't admit it to them out loud but he was afraid to think about anything until the entire team was assembled in case he in some way sabotaged Ariadne by accident. He wanted the reassuring presence of the other men to help remind him to balance his mercurial emotions with his cold, hard logic.

As Dom was entering "We Are the Music Makers" started echoing all around. Arthur hadn't heard the poem since Dom had told it to him on their first job together about eight years ago. The poem soothed Arthur, it gave him something neutral to cling to while the team popped into existence.

But the poem faded and soon they were being mocked by the sheer mutedness of the grayscape they were trapped in. They were being beaten by its emptiness, assailed by its utter nothingness.

Eames seemed to be circling the other two men and watching them as if they were bombs. It was his job, for a change, to be in charge of the care of other people. Eames had been given the responsibility of watching out for everyone's ass—if Arthur seemed like he was cracking Eames was the one who was making the call. Cobb walked up to Arthur who was pacing vertically up and down in the abyss.

Cobb reached out and put a hand on Arthur's shoulder, forcing the Point Man to cease his pacing, "Arthur, you're going to drive me up a wall if you keep that up. Take a breath, count to ten."

"Sorry." He met eyes with Eames who held up a finger—_first warning_.

"It's up to you to pull her into us—tell me, Arthur, what do you think she'll be wearing?" Cobb wanted to be conversational but he knew Arthur was feeling the pressure to have the best dreaming experience of his life. The thing about dreaming was that the more tense you felt the harder it was for the dream to go smoothly.

"Clothes." Arthur shuttered and Eames sighed, "Well I bloody well hope so! How about a little _specificity_, Point Man?"

Arthur glared at Eames but closed his eyes, "She'd be wearing the Oxfords. She told me that she bought them after she got accepted to graduate school in Paris because she didn't want to be caught in sneakers. She wasn't used to them and for a week her feet bled but then she finally broke them in and hasn't bought a new pair of shoes since."

The tension in Arthur's shoulders eased and the furrow in his brow dissipated. Cobb saw the gray nothingness thicken like fog just over Arthur's shoulder.

"Oxfords don't really go with skirts, I suppose she'll be in pants?"

"Her favorite pair of jeans is worn in the heels and the upper left thigh because when she's nervous she rubs that part of her leg. They probably used to be black but they look like a dark blue now." Arthur let himself smile, "She has a tannish-gray coat and she'd probably have a simple tank over plain long sleeve shirt. I think the long-sleeves will be purple and the tank will be black. The scarf is always the brightest part—everything else has to be simple or they'll overwhelm it."

"Which scarf will she have?"

"The new one. Yellow silk—floral designs. She usually favors heavier material than silk but she really likes silk. She doesn't think that it _goes_ with her usual style. That it's too pretty."

"What do you think?"

Arthur sighed and opened his eyes, "I think she's more beautiful than the silk."

Cobb motioned his chin over Arthur's shoulder and the Point Man turned around—hovering in that chilling manner of the coma state. It reminded Arthur of when she had been trapped in the zero-gravity hotel room, floating around, vulnerable to attack.

Her eyes were closed and her hair was floating through the air, half-obscuring her face. Her engagement ring glittered on her hand and Arthur reached out and took her hand in his.

"I've missed her." He pressed a kiss to her hand and she began to fall out of the sky in what seemed like slow motion. Her body gently fell to the ground and Arthur had plenty to time to situate himself so that he was cradling her. When her body touched down he noticed that the outline of gray bricks began at her body and crawled out into the infinite horizon. At first everything was gray outlines, like pencil sketches, but all the men noticed that there was a weight in the world now and general rules of physics.

Arthur pushed her hair out of her face and waited to see if she would open her eyes.

She took a deep breath and shifted in her sleep, curling against Arthur's body, and his face burst into a smile. The world around them was suddenly in vibrant color- The gray cobblestone streets were surrounded by bright green grass and their hotel was in the distance, the only building that was there. Yellow flowers sprung up between gaps in the cobblestone and all over the grass; there were dandelions, daisies, tiger lilies, daffodils, and giant sunflowers.

Eames and Cobb looked at the hotel and Cobb frowned- he still felt sheepish about missing the whole courtship that had begun during the Fischer job.

"Cobb?"

"Yes?"

"The safe in the hotel is kept in an underground chamber that can be found from an entrance in the manager's office—to the left of the bar."

"Where are you going?"

"To our room." Arthur looked up but in a blink he was gone with Ariadne and they had suddenly wound up in their original room from that very first romantic evening. Champagne was still chilling, the covers were still drawn down, and there was a scented bubble bath was drawn. Ariadne was curled up in Arthur's arms and he walked over to the bed and laid her down on it. He was overjoyed when she shifted agitatedly and rolled onto her side.

Grinning ear to ear he turned on the TV, switched it to Casablanca, and crawled onto the bed until her face was pressed against his chest and her hands were flexing against his shirt. He was beyond happy to just see her _move_ again. For so long she had just sat on a bed, motionless, and now she at least seemed _alive_.

He pressed a kiss to her head and whispered, "Don't rush it. Take your time. We have some time."

And he would wait.

* * *

Cobb and Eames were left staring at one another when Arthur disappeared with Ariadne into the hotel.

Eames looked at Cobb with an irritated expression, "As far as I'm concerned that is strike two- what are we supposed to do here without her projections? Make daisy chains?"

Cobb shrugged, "If he thinks he can bring her out alone, let him try. We have three days here if we have to toss him and try ourselves we do it. I wouldn't start considering that option until at least tomorrow night."

"Tomorrow night?" Eames scoffed, "I need a drink. At least there's no bartender."

* * *

_"Play it again, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By.'"_

As Ingrid Bergman pleaded to hear her old love song played out in her old lover's bar Cobb and Eames were on their third round of drinks when suddenly a bartender appeared. So did a few other patrons who were at tables talking lowly to one another.

"Projections are a good sign." Cobb nodded and saluted Eames with his Jack-and-Coke.

Upstairs Ariadne groaned in her sleep and twitched her foot. Arthur drew his eyes away from the screen and focused on her—her leg folded and unfolded and her groaning turned into a peeved moan.

Then he got what he had waited for months to see….

Ariadne's eyelashes fluttered to reveal her eyes.

He swore that his heart stopped in that moment.

"Good morning." She whispered and smiled at him, stretched her arms above her head and then nuzzled it back into his chest, "Did you get any sleep?"

From where her head was she could hear how hard his heart was pounding and she looked up into his eyes, slightly startled, "Are you alright?"

He couldn't help it- he kissed her. He tangled a hand in her hair at the base of her neck and kissed her so hard that he heard the surprised hitch of breath catch in her throat.

"I'm amazing." He breathed as he paused in kissing her, "Just amazing."

She giggled as he kissed her again and he could hear laughter from the other rooms, he could hear foot traffic outside, he heard birds chattering as they flew by and he knew that her subconscious had woken up.

"I'm starving." Her stomach growled, "Feel like I haven't eaten in a week. What do you feel like?"

"Order room service, whatever you want. I'm not hungry." Arthur drank in the sight of her awake and in motion as she sat up, sought out the menu, chewed on her bottom lip as she read it and eventually picked up the phone to dial down. She placed her order and got up to look for her purse.

"Arthur, have you seen my bag? I don't remember where I dropped it."

_Now is as good a time as there will be. _

"Where were you when you last had it?"

"I was…. I was…" Ariadne furrowed her brow and tried to recall where she had been but couldn't, "Well we were at the…"

"Call down to the bar." Arthur suggested, "And ask for Mr. Charles."

Ariadne did what Arthur told her to do but couldn't remember why that name sounded so familiar to her until she heard Dom Cobb's voice say, "It's good to hear from you Ariadne. We've missed you."

"Really? Have I been gone long?"

"I'll let Arthur fill you in." Dom paused and the phone was passed along to Eames who said, "Never let it be said that I'm a man that doesn't keep my promises. Hope you're feeling well darling."

The line died and the two mind-thieves at the bar allowed themselves a brief cheer for Ariadne's wakefulness. Then they finished their drink and walked out of the bar and into the lobby where they started stalking out the safe where Ariadne would store the secrets they had to steal. They hoped that her subconscious was awake enough to give them a solid chase- solid enough to keep her with them even after the kick.

"Arthur…what's Dom doing here? And Eames? What's going on?"

Arthur put both his hands on her shoulder and said, evenly, "Stay calm and check your totem."

"Calm…calm." Ariadne took deep breaths and removed her bishop from her pocket. As soon as her hand wrapped around it something wasn't right—the felt was too rough, the color was tinted green, and the weight felt wrong. When she tried to tip it over the bishop spun in slow but endless circles on its round base and Ariadne stared at it wide-eyed, "We're dreaming. Why didn't I remember that? Arthur—what's going on?"

"_Stay calm_." He whispered and guided her to the bed. She shook her head and stood up, pacing by the window, "Tell me what you do remember."

"I remember Eames. I remember this scarf," She wound her fingers around the scarf nervously, "I remember Brazil and how _hot_ it was there. Way too hot for most of the clothes I packed. _Packed_. We were somewhere else…we were in Canada? And now we're ….we're in our Fischer hotel. Why? Whose dream is this? How did we wind up here?"

"What were we doing for Eames, Ariadne?" He relished just being able to talk to her again and sincerely hoped that she wasn't getting too excited for her dormant brain to keep up with.

"We were….helping him…" Ariadne looked down at her shoes as she drew a blank, "How did that go?"

"You took a serious hit to the head." Arthur winced as he remembered, "We completed the extraction but you wound up in a coma."

"A Coma?" Then Ariadne stumbled as if she'd tripped and she drew in a sharp gasp of air, "The Nothing. The Gray Space. It feels like a boulder on your chest- you want to move but you're trapped. You want to dream but you can't fall asleep. You want to live but you feel like you're dying and there's nothing, _nothing_ you can do about it."

She slumped onto the bed next to Arthur, "We're _there_ aren't we? How did the hotel get here? Are you real? Am I dreaming you too?"

"I'm real. I came here to get you with Dom and Eames." He smiled sadly, "You've been in a coma for months and we've been working on a way to get you out- to jumpstart coma patients out of The Nothing."

Ariadne looked frightened at the idea of the Nothing and chewed on her thumbnail, "How do you help?"

"Well the first is convincing you to show up in the Nothing, which we did. Then we construct a dream and you have to fill it with projections, which you did. Then we have to try and keep you focused on us and grounded and then there's a synchronized kick. If all goes well you'll kick out with us and wake up in the real world."

"How do you keep me focused?"

"They steal from you and your subconscious chases them around. You…well I suppose I'm your conscious' point of focus." He smirked tiredly at her, "Please try and keep calm or else you will overwhelm your brain."

"You came into the Nothing for me?" She threw her arms around him and hugged him fiercely. He held her closely and when they parted she placed a hand on his chest, "Are you feeling ok?"

"Me?" Arthur sounded surprised, "Yes, I'm fine. Why do you ask?"

She tapped his unbuttoned shirt, "No tie."

He laughed and kissed her, "Is it not the real me without a tie?"

"You're real… only the real Arthur gives me butterflies."

He wrapped his arms around her again, protectively, and said softly, "Keep chasing those butterflies, love, even when you're the one that's falling. _Please_ keep chasing them."

* * *

They were walking hand in hand down the stairs to the lobby (Arthur flatly refused to go into the elevators again). Ariadne was gripping his hand tightly as if he was all that was holding her here and without him she might accidentally float off into the gray again. She was skittish, nervous and Arthur eventually rubbed the small of her back, "Relax. Please relax."

"It's a little hard knowing that the stability of my brain depends on my ability to remain calm and the consequences of destabilizing my brain involve either a permanent vegetative state or death." Ariadne snipped and took a deep breath, rubbing the bridge of her nose, and said, "Sorry. I'm sorry, I just… It's a lot."

"I know. You're doing well." He opened the door to the lobby for her and said, "Do you remember that you were planning out a new countryside? A new maze?"

"Yeah," She nodded, "We'll probably never use it but it's nice to play with it."

"Tell me about it."

Ariadne wrapped her arm around his waist and he slung his over her shoulder, "Well it has cows and horses."

"Didn't know you liked farm animals—why those?"

"I like the sound of mooing and I rode horses as a kid. Not to mention they are maneuverable walls—they can alter the maze while we're dreaming in a completely natural manner that won't attract undo attention. Think about it—if there are free-ranging cows are you going to go around them or through them? What about a herd of running horses?"

Arthur nodded, "An elegant solution to the problem of evolving structures during the dream."

Ariadne beamed at the compliment, "Also barns are surprisingly complex because they have exposed architectural elements and tend to be monotone so you can disguise a surprisingly large number of rooms without the proportions seeming off. My barn is designed to have collapsing walls based on trip points—even more rotating walls for the maze. There's also some underground tunnels from the barn to the house to the cabin by the lake."

"There's a lake? And it has a cabin?"

"Yeah we have a huge lake that has beavers, trout, salmon, and catfish. I know that beavers wouldn't be there in nature but I'm assuming most people wouldn't know that and I find them adorable."

Arthur smirked, "Got a thing for buck teeth?"

She winked and laughed, "Yeah they get me all hot and bothered. If you had buck teeth and a flat tail that smacked tree stumps you'd be in trouble."

As their mood lightened the sun shone brightly, the projections laughed and even seemed to walk like they were skipping.

"What about the lake cabin?"

"It's just a cabin—open floor plan except for the bathroom. Open kitchen, open living room with a small, wood-burning fireplace, and open bedroom. It's tiny, all wood, mostly cherry and mahogany." She leaned her head against his shoulder as they walked towards the bar, "I was mostly thinking of it as a hiding place for us in the dream. Somewhere to go the next time we have to lay low for a day or so waiting for the mark to get comfortable."

"A love nest?"

"Yes for the living in sin couple." She giggled, "Love nest? Really?"

"We aren't living in sin anymore…technically. Remember you have a shiny piece of metal and rock on your hand?"

She looked at her hand then flashed him a devious smile, "Technically, smchechnically. I like the living in sin part of our time together."

Arthur offered her a chair at the bar and she slid into it. He pressed a kiss to her head and nuzzled into her hair for a moment, _I've missed you._

He didn't have to say it, she knew. She also knew that he was trying to keep her calm while they waited for the devious duo of Cobb and Eames.

The two of them eventually showed up just as Arthur and Ariadne were getting their drinks.

"Hello dear, you look perky." Eames leaned in and kissed her cheek. Cobb held out his hand and she shook it and asked, "How is family life?"

"It was great until this very stiff guy in a suit shows up at my door asking me to help him wake up his comatose fiancé." Cobb pulled Ariadne into a hug, "I'm glad to see you on your feet."

"Thanks, tell the kids that we said hello… you know, when we wake up."

"I will." Cobb smiled at her and shook off the bartender when he offered Cobb another round and turned to Arthur, "So do you want to wait it out together or can you be trusted?"

"I'm focused. How long do you think we have?"

"My count says that we spent a day and a half in nothing. Now we just have tonight and tomorrow before Miles kicks us." Eames allowed himself another cocktail and shrugged, "I figure that sometime tomorrow early we'll break into the safe and let you chase us for a few hours before the kick."

"Should you be telling me about the theft?" Ariadne asked as she sipped on the same red wine she and Arthur had previously enjoyed in this hotel.

"It'll make your subconscious harder to steal from and more tenacious after the theft." Arthur explained, "Which is why we never tell people usually but in your case it might help. We need you to feel connected and involved so that you ride the kick out of the Nothing."

"What happens to you if you're killed in here, just for clarity?"

"Us?" Cobb clarified, "We just wake up. You we aren't so sure about so try not to take a slug. We assume you die or remain in the coma."

"Those two options keep popping up." Ariadne rolled her eyes and took a long swallow of her wine.

"Ignore the bad news, I always do." Eames clicked his glass against hers, "Look on the bright side—free room service, unlimited drinks at the bar, and I'm sure that there's something juicy on cable."

"It's so cute that you think I'm not having sex with my fiancé in the fancy hotel room." Ariadne playfully punched Eames' arm as he choked on his drink.

"I'm never going to be right again, that image is going to lodge itself in my brain." He complained and nudged Cobb, "Let's go retire for the night. I heard Arthur keeps a stock of bond movies on the movie channels and you know I love Bond movies."

* * *

That night Arthur and Ariadne didn't sleep. Around three o'clock in the morning they were wrapped up in one another, staring at the clock and Ariadne's endlessly circling Bishop. She absently traced patterns on Arthur's chest and sighed, "Are you afraid?"

"Of?" He tucked her hair behind her ear and tried to memorize her.

"This not working."

"Are you?"

She let the sheets slip down and sat up so she could look him in the eye, "Worried, I guess. Not afraid. I want to wake up but it doesn't scare me to think that I won't."

Arthur shuttered pulled the sheets up to their shoulders, "Why not?"

"Death never scared me. I'd die and if I slipped back in I trust you to realize that you have to pull the plug….the _nothing_ scares me. I love the dreams because I can make things, because I'm a natural creator. And destruction, death, it doesn't scare me because if you love creation you have to understand and accept destruction. But in the nothing there's no creation, no destruction. It's…it's hell. I _knew_ that I was trapped, but I was absolutely helpless."

She wrapped her arms around him as if his presence kept her away from that terrible gray nothing. He gently pushed her onto her back and propped himself up over her, "One way or another, you're free by tomorrow night. I promise."

"Promise we get to sign the stupid marriage license when we're back."

"That I can't promise. Eames would wind up being one of the witnesses and seeing as how he put you in a coma I intended to suspend wedding privileges from him."

Ariadne smacked Arthur's shoulder, "Don't hold that grudge forever, it's not healthy."

She shifted her hips and Arthur sucked in a breath, "If you want it, you'll get it. If you asked me for the moon I'd find a way to give it to you."

"I just want you." She smiled and pulled him down for a long, hard kiss.

* * *

Eames had a pillow over his head and was moaning, "_When_ will it be _over_?"

"Well, Eames, see when two people care about one another they sometimes choose to…" Dom started with a smirk but Eames smacked him in the face with a pillow.

All around them the orgasmic screams and groans echoed as if there were speakers in every wall broadcasting a dirty movie. Dom had popped some earbuds in, opened up a book, and pretended that he couldn't hear anything at all. Arthur had once been subjected to four hours of sex flashbacks when he was working with Dom after one particularly wild anniversary celebration and Dom figured that this was fair turnaround. Eames, on the other hand, looked like he was being tortured.

"This is _not_ a side of _either one of them_ that I _ever wanted to know about_."

"Just remember not to turn on the tv and you should be fine. Go take a shower, might drown it out."

"I am afraid to be alone with those noises in a hot shower and having to link my personal masturbatory practices with Arthur indelibly for the rest of my life."

"Take a cold shower."

"_Are you trying to kill me_?" Eames growled, "Cold showers are _so _much more painful than listening to this."

"Should've brought an IPod." Dom laughed and blasted the sound on Florence and the Machines_._

_

* * *

_

The next morning Arthur and Ariadne were lounging in bed, sleeping to the reassuring sound of the brass Bishop circling on the table, when an alarm sounded and they both bolted up to investigate the noise.

"What is that?" Ariadne asked as she held her hands over her ears.

"Eames and Arthur must have gone for the safe…" He reached over to the phone and called down to the main desk, "Can you shut the alarm off, please?"

Within a few minutes the alarm was off and Ariadne was wrapped in a robe and prepping the bathtub with bath salts. Arthur snuck up behind her and kissed her neck, "What are the odds that you'll tell me what they've stolen?"

Ariadne froze mid-pour and looked at him nervously. He kissed her again and whispered, "I'll tell you what my deepest fears are? Fair trade? Cobb and Eames had to see them while we were prepping for this."

"Why did they get to see that?"

"They wanted to see how on edge I was… apparently I managed well enough for them to trust me."

Ariadne dropped her robe and climbed into the tub, Arthur followed her and he could tell she was chewing over his question.

"What did they see?" She asked as she ran a bar of soap over his shoulders.

"You dead and your mother berating me at the funeral."

Ariadne nodded as if she understood, "My mother would hand you your ass at my funeral in the current status of things. I swear she's usually very nice. What else?"

"Me having to fall back into old life with corporate gangsters because of my reputation—they threaten our family. We never have a normal life. We never get away from this persistent danger."

"We have a family?"

"My last dream that they saw was our firstborn. You were leaving me because you couldn't take it anymore—you couldn't take the life of a nomadic criminal anymore. You were going away and taking our baby with you and I wasn't going to get to see either of you again."

He felt her whole body freeze up and then she wrapped her arms and legs around him and squeezed him as if to show him how sorry she was about her Dream-Self, "I wouldn't do that…I wouldn't ever do that to you."

"I know but it doesn't stop it from being a primal fear of mine." He pressed his hands on top of hers and then reclined against her chest, "Your turn."

"Get my hair?"

As they rearranged themselves so that Arthur was shampooing Ariadne's hair she cleared her throat and said, "They have manila folder with photographs in it."

"What are the photographs of?"

"You dead. There's a few versions of your death- you've been shot, you've been hit with an explosive, you've been beaten to death by an angry mob…"

"I get the picture." He flinched, "Angry mobs are the worst. Worse than explosions."

She hummed with pleasure as he massaged her coconut shampoo into her scalp and then said, "There's pictures of my mother's death, of her funeral and I wasn't there. Like what happened with your dad. There's pictures of us in jail."

"Anything else?"

She blushed, "Pictures of me showing a toddler your grave. Pictures of a kids with our features that wind up alone because we're both gone. That part of Mal and Dom scare me more than anything else—the fact that Phillipa and James have spent years being shuffled around to different relatives in different places because their parents became twisted from dreaming too much."

Arthur remembered promising Cobb that he'd make his kids orphans and regretted forgetting that the kids were humans who would live to be grossly affected by Cobb's absence.

"There's one pictures of my Bishop spinning and never stopping. Of never waking up and seeing the real world." Ariadne looked back at him, "The dreams are beautiful because we compare them to the limits of the real world but if dreams become the constant all it does is turn the real world ugly… and it's not ugly. It's limited and that's for the best."

Arthur poured warm bath water over her head and washed out the shampoo. He pulled the plug on their bath and got out first, wrapping himself in a towel and holding one out for Ariadne. She tucked it into itself and cupped his chin, "Do you want to talk about both of us being afraid of ruining children we don't have?"

"Yes, but not now."

"Why not?"

"I don't want them to be a part of a dream."

Ariadne smirked and nodded at Arthur's watch, "How much time do we have?"

"About five hours."

Downstairs they heard the distance echo of gunfire as Cobb and Eames eluded security.

Ariadne let her towel drop to the ground and walked into the bedroom, "What channel is _Anastasia_ on?"

Arthur followed her, letting his towel fall, "I don't remember. Give me a kiss, see if it jogs my memory."

* * *

As the sun was setting there was a frantic pounding on their door.

"Get your fucking clothes on and get to the roof."

Arthur opened the door to Eames and the forger could see that Arthur was already in a suit, with a tie, and Ariadne was in a white blouse and a simple gray silk skirt.

"Are you alright?" Ariadne asked and Eames pointed an accusatory finger at her, "You have a devious, devious subconscious. They are a load of assholes and they've been riding my ass all day. Up to the roof, please, I'm ready to leave the creepy coma dream now."

They had to practically run up the stairs as the security detail kept catching up to them. Arthur shot a few of the guards and helped Eames barricade the door against them. Cobb was waiting with Ariadne's folder marked _Confidential_ in his hands.

"Ariadne, remind me never to piss you off." Cobb motioned to a large bruise on his cheek with a heavily bleeding hand.

"When is the signal going to start?" She asked but no sooner had the words left her lips did the booming introductory lines of Edith Piaff begin echoing in the world.

The three men checked their watches and Cobb said, "I have a minute, Arthur?"

"I have fifty eight seconds."

"I'm down to fifty six so let's assume we're good to go and ride this kick the hell out of here." Eames looked like he wanted to just go whether or not it worked and Ariadne made a mental note to ask him just what he subconscious did to him to annoy him so much.

Arthur took Ariadne's hand, "Keep holding onto me."

"I will." She promised and Cobb started counting down, "We jump in five….four…three….two…."

They jumped.

_One_.

* * *

Arthur woke up on the floor of the Brazilian hotel room and immediately rolled his dice. _Four. Four. Four. Four. Four. Four. Four. Four._

_ "_You're awake, Arthur. You're awake." Professor Miles was helping Cobb to his feet and Arthur saw Eames pop up, "Let's agree not to do that again, shall we?"

"It wasn't that bad, Eames." Cobb retorted and Eames rolled his eyes, "I did not see you get stuck in the booby trap with the pit of snapping lobsters. You _know_ crustaceans freak me out."

"Shut up, Eames." Arthur snapped and sat next to Ariadne. As if he cued them her monitors started fluttering and then her breathing hitched. For a few minutes her breathing was rushed and her heartrate shot up but then her eyes popped open and Arthur could've cared less what the machines wanted.

Her bishop had been in her hand since she'd been laid in the bed and she reached out, put it on the bedside table, and pushed it over. It made a satisfying _thunk_ and stayed placidly on its side. Tears filled her eyes, "Am I back?"

"Yes." Arthur flooded with relief, "Yes, you're back."

* * *

They watched her like a hawk for the first few hours even though she laughed at them and said they were treating her like a ticking time bomb. She flipped the Bishop over frequently and Arthur rolled his die about once an hour but nobody said anything too them: it was ok that they checked. After the first twenty four hours Arthur let Ariadne get out of the bed and he unhooked her from all the sundry monitors she'd been attached to. Eames and Cobb had to support her as she tested her weak legs out but she managed to walk to the balcony unassisted by the end of the day.

"It's beautiful here." She said to Arthur. She was wearing a plain blue sweatpants and an old t-shirt of his, he thought she looked like a painting.

"It's ruined for me." He told her, "I'm afraid we'll have to find some other tropical paradise to call our own."

"I like having seasons. Let's go somewhere with all four." She smiled and he held out something for her. She took it without asking what it was- it had the same weight and texture as airline tickets and she opened the flap to see that there were two tickets on this weekend's flight back to the States. Not just to the States but O'Hare International, a hop, skip, and jump away from her hometown.

Ariadne smiled and said, "Hope you plan on having my scarves from Canada shipped to my mom's house because I'm going to need them there this time of year."

"I already arranged it."

* * *

Ariadne was still weak and tired and she went to sleep early after dinner. Cobb was packing to leave on tonight's flight back to Marseilles with Miles when Arthur asked for a moment of his time.

"Cobb- do you miss it?"

"Dreams? … Yeah, of course I do. Nobody ever really stops loving it." He looked up at Arthur, "But I don't want to get back into Extraction."

"Neither do I." Arthur leaned against the door jam, "But I have an idea. Something I've been toying with… do you think Stephen still has his old Military Contacts?"

"Where's this going?"

"To a place where we can have the dreams and our families and not have to run for a living."

Cobb turned away from his suitcase, "I'm listening."

To Be Continued

* * *

A/N- I'm thinking the next chapter is the last, my loves. How did you like this one?


	10. Chapter 10

The Beautifully Logical Progression

He opened his eyes and looked around, taking inventory, and saw his office precisely as he knew it always was—two hundred year old oak furniture carved into a sleek modern desk with two matching end tables, a wall with a massive floor to ceiling built-in bookshelf jam packed with sundry books including several first editions, a hand-woven Indian rug from one of the many stops on his honeymoon that Ariadne had wanted to see in person and not just through Arthur's dream-memories, and a handsome leather couch that Cobb had sent him as a wedding present.

Still—any experienced dreamer knew that you couldn't always trust your eyes. Arthur took out his die, opened a drawer, and rolled it away from the prying eyes of about six people in his office. Four.

Four.

_No need for a third_. Arthur ran his hand over his slicked back hair and looked up at his students. Each of them was checking their own totem and a relieved look washed over them each time the totem reaffirmed their reality.

"Alright, who can summarize the lesson?"

One hand raised but a curt male voice cut in, "In terms of stability, the dream must go completely undetected which means trying to control your voluntary assessment of the dream or else you run the risk of your subconscious exposing the con."

Groans echoed from the other pupils and one quiet girl in the back kept her hand raised, "Georgianne?"

"Also you have to maintain an assessment of your setting and the subconscious clues of the mark to ascertain whether or not they suspect anything. It is important to keep track of the little things the projections do—nervous ticks like nail biting, tapping their fingernails, or smoking could be a sign that the mark suspects the con."

The boy who had spoken out of turn flicked his eyes at her and Arthur detected a minute smile just starting to form on his face. The girl rested her gaze on the back of the boy's head and sighed a little before she stuck the cord of her sweatshirt in her mouth and nibbled on it. The boy adjusted his leather jacket and tried to look nonplussed at the overwhelmingly annoyed classmates who generally found him an apple-polishing pain-in-the-ass.

Arthur found him to be a bit too much like his teacher and it was a little uncomfortable for the Point Man, "Very good, both of you. By Friday you all need to have a workable draft of three emergency exits based off of today's exercise."

Groans filled the room except for the Apple Polisher and Georgianne.

"Drafts, as always, must be typed, double-spaced, with a cover page, an index, and no less than six diagrams."

Georgianne shoved her books in her bag and sat the sack delicately on her lap. She had a scuffed pair of black and white wingtips that reminded Arthur of poodle skirts and carhops. The Apple Polisher leaned over to put his own books away and held a lingering look at her shoes. Arthur wondered how long it would take the uptight, straight A student to ask out his meek classmate.

"Professor?"

Arthur focused on Georgianne as she approached his desk, "Yes?"

"Is your wife's class still at five tomorrow?"

"It's delayed to six, she has a doctor's appointment. Have you decided which role suits you more?"

Georgianne shrugged and her reddish brown hair fell in her face, "Still deciding. I think I'm more suited to Point but I really love architecture."

"It'll come to you."

She nodded. Outside the door her overzealous classmate waited for her and Arthur heard him ask, "Do you want to compare notes for the homework?"

* * *

Arthur escorted his students out of their side entrance and walked down the hall and up the stairs where the sounds of construction became increasingly louder. Drills and electric saws buzzed in the air and the end of the hallway became draped in Tyvek and drop cloths. Three doors down on the right was a plywood outline of a door and inside was a rudimentary floor. A woman in a burnt orange sweater, dark jeans, scuffed up Oxfords and a purple and green paisley scarf stood holding a blueprint, gently directing the various workmen and consulting with the head builder.

"Make sure that the load wall extends deeply enough into the room that the beams can take the weight off of the windows. I want the wall of windows to have as little wood interruption as we can manage. And I want you to be sure that the proportions go into the Mughal dome for the ceiling and the windows mimic _iwans_."

"Yes m'am. My men have experience with Indian designs."

"Technically they're Persian designs." She smirked and touched her thumb to the center of her back, "One of my favorite stops on my honeymoon was the Taj Mahal."

"It was a gift for the queen."

"Her tomb actually, but nonetheless a very splendid gift."

Arthur cleared his throat, "He was buried next to her, you know. Together forever."

The woman handed the blueprints to the head builder and turned around, "Some say he saw the vision for the Taj in a dream."

"It's from the Koran." Arthur smiled, "A depiction of heaven."

"Hence the perfect choice for the new addition." Ariadne leaned her head into Arthur's shoulder and he burrowed his nose into her hair, inhaling deeply, "How was class?"

"They're catching on. Some faster than others."

She nodded and tried to massage her lower back again, Arthur reached down and kneaded it for her, "Better?"

"Mmhmm." She closed her eyes and relished the sensation for a minute, "Did you remind them that class with me is moved to six tomorrow?"

"Georgianne asked me to confirm."

Ariadne rolled her eyes, "She'll email the whole bunch of them a reminder."

He shrugged, "Saves you from doing it. She's extremely on task."

"She's anal retentive. She's going to pick Point over Architect, I just know she is." Ariadne made a face, "Another one bites the dust. I need to go visit universities again and recruit."

"Not for a few more months, you aren't. I'll do it if you feel the need to have it done directly but really you still have a class of eight. It's more than I have." Arthur laid a hand on her burgeoning belly and tapped his fingers to remind her of a growing burden.

She shot him a look that said _As if I forgot about that._

Ariadne laid a hand over his, "I know, I know... Think we're doing alright? The school, I mean. I know the renovations are going splendidly. I make _certain_ that they go splendidly."

Arthur humphed over that because he was of the opinion that letting his pregnant wife hang out in a construction site was a bad idea but he found it hard to say no to her and she was very picky about how the new addition, a nursery and playroom, were to look. She had been very picky about the building of their country home from day one and he had to appreciate the end result. They had a positively _stunning_ home. There had been offers from a few magazines to feature them but they politely refused- it was their home, one of the things that they didn't share in full with anyone else. Students had a wing, visitors were met in a wing, and there were a dozen passageways and architectural paradoxes to get lost in before you got to the heart of the home where they lived. They were almost always working on some part of the house, keeping it fluid and unique so that no matter how hard someone from the outside studied it they could never fully duplicate it. Parallels had been drawn with the Winchester Mystery House with the constant state of work, secret halls and doors and seemingly senseless architectural motives but they didn't care. This was a dream for them, a dream made real, and if it seemed crazy to the world at large ... well... that was part of what made it _feel_ like a dream with the added bonus of knowing that they were wide awake.

The house was one they half-remembered from a dozen dreams. Something they had cooked up with all the different things they loved from different landmarks and styles. Most people wouldn't get the aesthetic but they did and that was all they needed.

Ariadne held up another blueprint under Arthur's nose and he flicked his eyes at her sideways, "The new plans for expansion?"

"Expansion of the school if you think it can handle having a building bigger than our offices."

Arthur smirked, "With the funding we get for it we could easily expand it... within certain parameters."

"Such as?"

"It's not allowed to have it's own zip code."

Ariadne rolled her eyes and unrolled the blueprint, "See if this meets your impeccably high standards."

She smoothed her sweater over her bump and Arthur caught her rubbing her right knee and said, "I'll look at it when you're laying in bed with a pillow under your feet."

"Yes, doctor." She allowed him to lead her down the twisting, winding floor plan and into the Spartan bedroom they occupied. It had a deep cherry floor and accents next to plain gray walls. The only real show-stopper was the floor to ceiling copy of _Ascending and Descending_ by Escher across from their bed. It was a simple king bed with a cherry four-poster frame and paisley sheets. Their master bath was attached and done entirely in a deep gray and white marble. It looked like a home edition of their favorite hotels and they still got goosebumps walking into it together and feeling smacked over the face with that at-home feeling.

Arthur turned down the sheets for Ariadne and plumped pillows for her and she rolled her eyes, "I _can_ do that myself. I'm not an invalid. Sacajawea climbs mountains with Louis and Clark when she was pregnant."

"You're not Sacajawea and I do not need you to lead me over mountains." Arthur kissed her forehead, "I just need you to take it easy and be healthy."

"This from the man who once threw me to a hungry grizzly bear."

"_I shot you before he got to you, I was trying to keep you away from the landmine."_

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. That old _trying-to-save-you-from-the-landmine_ line." She smiled and pulled him down to the bed next to her, he looked like he resented having his vest rumpled but in an instantly he wrapped an arm around her and placed a loving hand over her bulge.

"What are your plans for our training school?"

"It needs an official name."

"We aren't a legal facility, I'm not sure having a Google Keyword is necessarily in our best interests." Arthur felt a slight push coming from inside Ariadne's stomach and moved his hand to where the baby was kicking and beamed, "Is the name as far as you got?"

"Of course not, I have two floors designed. The space includes a cafeteria, dorms, research library with computer terminals, chemical room for document forging, art supply room for architectural design, a gym for physical training, offices for its esteemed teachers and a plain dreary-Parisian-warehouse inspired room for the actual dreaming with an affixed PASIV and a storage space for Somnacin."

The baby kicked doubletime as Ariadne listed the features of the room as if the little creature could sense her enthusiasm.

"You are going to put a serious dent in our funding." Arthur sighed and she nuzzled into him, "It's ok, I'm sure we can appeal to NATO or whatever."

"We're sponsored by a neutrality agreement of the U.N. underwritten by the E.U. and the U.S., NATO has nothing to do with it."

"Acronyms and I never agreed. I leave all that in your capable hands."

Arthur was about to lament his child's future if it couldn't decipher United States from U.S. when Ariadne's cell phone went off.

_Sweet dreams are made of this, Who am I to disagree? …._

She glanced at the number and shot Arthur a bemused look, "Hello mom."

He heard a yammering sound on the other line, "No mom, nothing tragic has happened since Monday when I last spoke to you…. No.. No, still pregnant, no early labor…"

Arthur tried to suppress a laugh but couldn't—Ariadne's mother had checked in once a week at minimum to see if Ariadne had spontaneously given birth yet (as if that would even be a _good_ thing when she was only six months in) and Ariadne smacked him to try and disguise the noise.

"No mom I wasn't laughing at you, that was Arthur…. Yes I agree twisted sense of humor," She rolled her eyes at him, pointed to her stomach and then mimed eating and gave him large, pleading eyes.

He pressed a quick kiss to her lips and said loudly enough for the cell phone to pick it up, "I'll get you a tuna sandwich, give my best to Cheryl."

Loud, angry squawking burst through the phone and Ariadne had to hold it away from her ear, "_Mom_ he was only _joking_ about the tuna…. Yes I'm sure he remembers that he promised you to never poison your unborn grandchild with mercury….Yes he's being very careful not to let me anywhere near the construction… Yes I know sawdust is bad for the baby….Yes I heard that Lysol kills 99.9% of germs… _No I have not Lysoled my coffee mug._ ….THAT WAS NOT AN ADMISSION OF DRINKING COFFEE!...Yes I want my child to have normal brain function…"

Arthur was laughing outright as he exited to the kitchen where he preheated the oven and got out the ingredients for Shepherd's Pie. As he was fixing it he took out his own phone and dialed the third preset but the number went to voicemail.

"Hi, it's Uncle Arthur calling to see how Maddy and Grace were doing. Hope you and Madeline are doing well, give me a call sometime before the weekend or else I'll be buried under a pile of papers."

He couldn't tell if his brother really wasn't home or had screened his call but it was nice to know that he'd get around to listening to it eventually. Their relationship would never be perfect but at least it existed now which was better than what it had been a few short years ago. His nieces had been told that Uncle Arthur died and they were delighted when he showed up one day with a pretty lady that they assumed was an angel and berated about the appearance of Heaven and the temperament of God (and, of course, whether or not they had met the girls' recently deceased Poodle in the Great Kennel In The Sky).

Dinner was assembled but needed to be cooked and Arthur rolled his die, saw the four, and sent out two lone text messages to well memorized numbers. The messages simply said "It's still real."

Cobb saw Arthur's message while he was walking into Phillipa's ballet recital, holding James' hand as the boy dragged his feet with everything he had so as not to be caught in a _ballet _recital, and the former Extractor smirked at the simple truth.

"Yes it is." He replied, "See you next week with my new group."

Arthur had cracked the code that Cobb had spent years trying to figure out—how to do dreams for a living without being a criminal. Arthur had used Miles' high ranking contacts in the military to gain an audience with the top officials of the United Nations. From there he had convinced them that since Extractors pretty much worked freelance for any country that would hire them it was in the best interests of the United Nations to set an unofficial regulation of the industry. Only France and Canada had legalized Dream Manipulation, and they only permitted it for its use in psychotherapy, but unofficially every country had a base where it taught its best and brightest how to make dreams and defend the mind. These students were later assigned to high ranking positions in the governments of whatever country they chose and the presence of so many well educated Dreamers had significantly reduced the number of Government Extractions that went on in a given year. At first Cobb had been suspicious that the out-of-work Extractors would come after himself and Arthur in retribution but rather the opposite had happened—most of the people in the Dream Industry weren't committed to a criminal lifestyle but a dreaming one and they were more than willing to have government approved dreaming sessions. Most of them were even willing to teach. It wasn't to say that the industry was perfectly safe or perfectly smooth sailing but it was at least a bit easier than before and there were significantly fewer bullets being shot at everyone.

Arthur and Cobb had also personally trained a team of doctors and psychiatrists to perform the Coma Wakenings. They weren't a publicly admitted form of treatment, yet, because of the extremely high death tolls but on the last report there was now a 40% chance of survival with full facilities.

Cobb knew that Arthur became more and more grateful for Ariadne's recovery every time new details from that particular experiment reached him.

As Phillipa danced Cobb imagined what life might have been like if this business had changed so little as five years ago. Mal might have been watching her daughter dance to The Waltz of the Sugarplum Fairy.

But, Cobb reminded himself, _this was real_. All the ups, and all the downs.

And it was worth it.

* * *

Eames opened his phone, took one look at Arthur's message, and typed back "Not as real as what I did to your mother" and shut his phone with a satisfied click. He returned his attention to the craps game going on in front of him and felt the reassuring weight of a stack of forged chips in his sleeve. Eames _was_ one who liked this life because it offered him the chance to both dream _and_ break laws so he had politely declined the opportunity to teach full-time at Arthur and Ariadne's little school.

"What would I teach them anyway besides a host of bad habits, eh?" He had asked but on the inside he had been touched. Once in a while he dropped by and when he did he would always moonlight as a real teacher and show the kiddies a thing or two about proper Physical Forging.

By his count he was due for a visit in a few months… once the little genetic clone of the Point Man was out and about in the world and probably organizing its stuffed animals by species and color. The quiet life of the others wasn't what Eames was interested in. He liked to cheat at cards and get paid under the table in Swiss bank accounts, he liked traveling all over the globe and resting with the assurance that he never had to remember a woman's name for longer than a few months. He enjoyed living in hotels (particularly five star ones) and he slept excellently on airplanes.

Still… it was nice to know that if he ever changed his mind, there was now an option besides waiting to grow too old to work and too wretched about that to care about living.

"Cheater! Cheat!" Someone across the table cried as one of Eames' chips fell out of his sleeve.

With one smart ass smirk he took off at a run through the casino and dodged bullets with the feeling of absolute vigor in his chest.

* * *

Ariadne got off the phone with her mother and rubbed her temples. She loved her mother, adored their conversations, but she would be a lot less bombarded with questions when the baby was safely delivered. Rubbing her hands over her engorged belly she wondered what it was, a boy or a girl, and knew that Arthur had already raided the doctor's notes and found out the sex and the measurements, to the millimeter, of the child's growth (for comparison purposes only). She knew that Arthur was make Shepherd's Pie, primarily because it was the only thing he was good at making, and she knew that she had a few minutes to be blissfully alone in their big, comfy bed without anyone besides the baby trying to figure out what was on her mind.

She pulled the brass Bishop out of her pocket and put it on the nightstand. It fell with a _Thud_ and she didn't retrieve it right away.

She was happy, doing what she loved with someone she loved and she was even getting the chance at having a family without the possibility of death, dismemberment or jail looming overhead. She was getting a life that she had never dreamed of having but, now possessing, could never be coerced into giving up.

She had _the _dream, the best dream, the one that you got to keep even after you woke up and she kept staring at the Bishop as though he was going to start rolling around when Arthur came in with her dinner. He pressed a button and part of the Escher lithograph opened to reveal a flat screen TV. They watched _It's a Wonderful Life_ and talked about colors to paint the nursery. Ariadne kept trying to trick Arthur into committing to a gendered color but he stuck to neutrals because he knew that Ariadne really wanted to be surprised. He hated surprises and loved knowing precisely what kind of little creature was going to be living in that Heavenly Nursery.

As they talked the sounds of the construction going on seemed to get closer, louder. The TV warbled a little.

And on the nightstand…

The Bishop rolled ever so slightly.

The End

* * *

A/N- Please review and on that parting note: toldya I was keeping it movie-verse! See if you can spot how it might work out that this isn't real (hint—the first sign is in the Coma Chapter, I was rather surprised none of you picked it up as a potential continuity flaw)

Love to all of you! Review review review review!

And yes, that is the last chapter. I haven't completely decided against more one-shots...really depends on the Inception DVD release which I predict to be the first week of December.


End file.
